How The Beatles Began: Part 2
‘You’ll never make a living from guitars’
Read Part One (5 minute read)
Aunt Mimi’s analysis regarding the limited earning potential of John’s guitar seemed a reasonable one in late 1950s Liverpool. Playing ‘beat music’ not an established a career path. Even accomplished musicians, like Paul’s father, aspired to earning beer money at best. ‘Don’t give up the day job’ was sound advice to teenagers banging out rock and roll covers in laughable accents.
The sudden, skiffle boom provided an unexpected opening. In 1955 Lonnie Donegan released a version of the American folk song, ROCK ISLAND LINE. To general astonishment it went to Number One in the US.
Even more importantly, the skiffle craze did seem to require technical training or an expensive instrument. All you needed was your mother’s washing board and a hunger to perform.
Though Donegan was a skilled jazz musician, he offered more relatable role model than Elvis. No Liverpool teenager dared imagine they could compete with the King. Faux Americana for fellow Scousers was a much more realisable target.
How did they learn to play songs?
Everything about the early musical education of the The Beatles was ad hoc. They learned songs largely by ear — watching other musicians play, listening to the records they liked and sharing practical technical tips with their peers.
At their first meeting John and Paul exchanged the chords they knew. George, passed his Quarrymen audition (held on the top of a night bus) by impressing a skeptical John with a ‘note perfect’ rendition of Duane Eddy’s RAUNCHY .
They picked up practical knowledge about about chord progressions and other technical matters on a piecemeal basis. Paul McCartney often tells how he and George across took a bus trip Liverpool to meet a guitarist who who could show them the B7 chord. It proved a very fruitful expedition:
Rock music is built on three foundational chords: the I, the IV, and V, which are all major chords. It’s the A-D-E combination, or G-C-D, or E-A-B …they already knew E and A, so B7 was the “missing chord.”
It helped that they were fast learners, as George Martin was later to observe. Soon John and Paul were reverse engineering songs they liked to create new ones of their own.
Where did the play?
The skiffle boom accelerated a general increase in live music — with small venues popping up to serve it. There was also a loosening of the musical standards required. In earlier years, the Wooton Garden Fete might have provided live music — but probably not from a scratch band formed months earlier. The lead singer was a sixteen-year-old with a rowdy reputation and — as fifteen year old Paul McCartney noticed — a shaky recall of song lyrics.
John {was} singing a song called ‘Come Go With Me’. He’d heard it on the radio. He didn’t really know the verses, but he knew the chorus. The rest he just made up himself. I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.
‘To the top, Johnny!’
Groups like The Quarrymen could now reliably fill small venues with fellow teenagers. This new audience wanted the thrill of rock and roll, even if it came with bum notes and a wobbly backbeat. Stage presence and attitude compensated for technical deficiencies.
What’s in a name?
The core of the group was formed early. Paul joined in July 57, George came on board (the bus, literally) in February 1958. They then went through two years of flux, with numerous changes of name and personnel. The Quarry Men became Johnny & the Moondogs. Then the Beatals, the Silver Beetles, the Silver Beats, and the Silver Beatles.
In Hamburg they seemed to settle on a line-up — but neither Stuart Sutcliffe nor Pete Best would be there when the world met the group Sutcliffe (probably) named The Beatles after the Crickets. An allusion to Buddy Holly was apt — he was the first pop star to wear glasses, a daring innovation that even the myopic wild-man Lennon didn’t dare to emulate.
In their first two years the ever-changing group trooped around family parties, church halls and coffee bars, building a modest following. They entered and usually lost local talent contests, but made enough of an impression to continue to get gigs. Progress was slow.
Only in Hamburg did their stage act really come together. They started at a dive called the the Indra, sharing filthy rooms but building a reputation as the craziest Englishmen in town. Then they progressed to bigger clubs, the Kaiserkeller and the Star.
Improvement meant painful decisions. Stuart Suctliffe was a painter not bass player — he left after an onstage fist fight with Paul. Who would play his unloved instrument? John and George characteristically ruled themselves out McCartney, more of a team player despite his uncomradely baiting of Suctliffe reluctantly took over the vacancy. He bought his departing sparring partner’s bass and restrung it for a left-hander.
Then someone snitched to the local police that George was only seventeen. In November 1960 he was unceremoniously deported. While his bandmates soldiered on in Hamburg, George hitchhiked back home.
Epstein
News of their various dramas drifted back to Liverpool. NEMS was the city’s premiere record shop (in a small field) cornering the growing market for selling singles to teenagers. The shop’s owner, Brian Epstein, noted requests were being made for an obscure German import called MY BONNIE, by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers.
Enquiries revealed that the Beat Brothers were the self-same Beatles performing at an increasingly popular venue called the Cavern Club on Matthew Street. As this was just a short distance from the shop Epstein went with a member of staff to investigate. His first impression is instructive:
‘What did you think?’ And I said I thought they were awful, quite honestly, but absolutely incredible. So Brian said, ‘that’s exactly my feelings.
George Martin would have similar doubts about their musicianship when they auditioned at Abbey Road the following summer. Once again energy and charisma trumped technical prowess.
The Beatles rose to the occasion, as they would do repeatedly over the next eight years. Again and again, they would face musical challenges that seemed beyond their technical capabilities. Somehow they would always find ways to clamber up to the next level.
Ringo remembers how when spirits were low in Hamburg, Lennon would rally his bandmates. “He’d say, ‘Where are we goin’, fellas? ‘ And we’d go, ‘To the top, Johnny!
