John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

when Cass and the Cassanovas were setting up, and asking to sit in with them on a couple of numbers. ‘He played “Ramrod”, the Duane Eddy instrumental,’ Gustafson remembers. ‘And Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah, I Love Her So”, doing the guitar breaks as well as the vocal. We had to admire his nerve.’

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

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

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

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

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

      After the show, Williams sought out Larry Parnes and suggested how Liverpool’s evidently fathomless adoration of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran might be exploited still further. Williams’s grandiose idea was a joint promotion between Parnes and himself that would combine the American stars and other Parnes acts with the best of Merseyside’s own rock-’n’-roll talent. Parnes took the bait, agreeing to bring Vincent and Cochran back for a second appearance, supported by other nationally-known groups like the Viscounts and Nero and the Gladiators, while Williams supplied local crowd-pullers like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Cass and the Cassanovas. The spectacular would be for one night only at the city’s boxing stadium, behind the Exchange railway station, on 3 May.

      Thanks to the combined rival attractions of Cynthia and Stu, Paul McCartney had recently felt himself taking ‘a bit of a back seat’ with John. But the Easter holiday of 1960 brought a major rebonding between them. Packing up a few clothes and their guitars, the pair hitchhiked 200 miles south to stay with Paul’s relatives Mike and Bett Robbins, who were now running a pub, the Fox and Hounds, in Caversham, Berkshire. They spent a week helping out at the pub, sharing a bed in an upstairs room as innocently as children.

      Their reward for unstinted bottle-stacking and glass-washing was to be allowed to perform for the Fox and Hounds’ customers over the weekend prior to their return home. Mike Robbins watched them rehearse and offered hints on presentation—for instance, that they shouldn’t tear straight into ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’, as they planned, but build up to it with an instrumental number, Les Paul and Mary Ford’s ‘The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise’. They gave their show seated on barstools in the pub lounge, billing themselves with a touch of Goonery as the Nerk Twins.

      Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent had by now reached the West Country, playing to yet another sold-out house at the Bristol Hippodrome on the Saturday night of 16 April. Before returning to Liverpool in three weeks, both had arranged to make a brief trip home to America. En route to catch a flight from Heathrow Airport right after the Bristol show, their hire car went out of control and smashed into a concrete lamp-post. Cochran, Vincent and Cochran’s girlfriend, the songwriter Sharon Sheeley, all suffered serious multiple injuries and were rushed to hospital in Bath. Cochran died two days later, fulfilling his own prophecy that he’d ‘be seeing Buddy soon’.

      On hearing what had befallen the two headliners of his co-promotion with Larry Parnes, Allan Williams understandably thought the show would have to be cancelled. Parnes, however, insisted that it should go ahead as planned on 3 May and that the hospitalised Gene Vincent would be fit enough to take part. In compensation for Cochran’s absence, Parnes provided extra acts from his London roster while Williams rounded up further local groups, among them Gerry and the Pacemakers, Bob Evans and His Five Shillings, and the Connaughts.

      The Beatals did not even try to get on the show, knowing they were automatically disqualified by their lack of a drummer. They could only watch from the audience as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Cass and the Cassanovas, and Gerry and the Pacemakers in turn pulled out all the stops to impress Larry Parnes. A photograph of the packed ringside crowd picked up John standing near the front, his face half-hidden among a thicket of hysterical girls. From a distance of 30-odd feet, you can still see the envy and longing in his eyes.

      Despite its organisational shortcomings, the event gave Allan Williams instant huge prestige as Larry Parnes’ ambassador on Merseyside. Even John was sufficiently awed to forget his usual fierce independence where his music was concerned and beg help of this seeming miracle-worker. A few days after the concert, he buttonholed Williams at the Jacaranda’s kitchen door with a muttered plea to ‘do something’ for the Beatals.

      From the local talent on show at the boxing stadium, Parnes had singled out only one potential addition to his stable. John Gustafson, the darkly handsome bass player with Cass and the Cassanovas, was invited to accompany Parnes back to London and be groomed for stardom in his inimitable fashion.

      To the rest, the opportunity Parnes offered was not to become pampered thoroughbreds so much as all-purpose workhorses. He was currently in urgent need of musicians to back his solo vocalists on the extensive tours through Britain that were their most lucrative market. Billy Fury himself, the stable’s premier attraction, was about to begin a string of nationwide appearances, but as yet had no group to accompany him. Hiring local sidemen to play on shows in the north and Scotland was an attractively cheaper option for Parnes than paying to transport them all the way up from London.

      He therefore detailed Allan Williams to assemble the best performers at the boxing stadium along with other deserving candidates for a mass audition-cum-talent contest. The winners would get the job of touring with Billy Fury, while the runners-up would be assigned to