Sometimes one person’s death brings memories flooding back of a whole era. If you came of age musically in the fifties or sixties, it was if Chuck Berry’s songs held up a mirror in which you saw your generation reflected and given mythic stature. Particularly if you were British, the insouciant swagger of his lyrics, the guitar just like a ringing bell, cruisin’ in your car and playin’ the radio, the lure of the juke joint after the school bell has rung, the cats who want to dance with sweet little sixteen – all of it sounded highly desirable and pretty mythic.
Same thing every day – gettin’ up, goin’ to school.
No need for me to complain – my objection’s overruled, ahh!
I had already read Jon Savage’s book 1966: The Years the Decade Exploded and seen the V&A exhibition, You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966 – 1970 when, just before Christmas, Steve Turner’s book, Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year, fell into my hands. Would I be up for a return trip to the year now regarded as a turning point, not only in music but more widely in culture and politics? Could Turner turn a chronicle of the Beatles’ day-to-day activities that year into a readable and engrossing narrative? The answer was resoundingly affirmative. Continue reading “Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year Steve Turner’s book about a pivotal year in the life”→
Since Christmas Day I’ve been reading Tune In, the first of three volumes in which Mark Lewisohn intends to tell the definitive story of the Beatles. It’s a grand book in every sense of the word: this volume clocks in at close on a thousand pages and ends just as the group travel to London to record their first single ‘Love Me Do’; it’s also meticulously-researched and written with passion, authority and elegance. This is not your average pop hagiography, but an informed and insightful social history of Liverpool and the emergent youth culture of the 1950s.
There was another fascinating exhibition on at the British Library when I went there last week to see West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song. The Alice in Wonderland exhibition, on until April 2016, marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s story. I recently finished reading The Annotated Alice, a deeply engrossing labour of love edited by Martin Gardner, so I was irresistibly drawn to a captivating exhibition that explores the enduring attraction of Carroll’s book. Continue reading “Alice in Wonderland at the British Library: a ‘sacred text’ and reinterpretations”→
I was so disappointed by Donovan’s concert at the Liverpool Phil a couple of weeks back that I couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to write about. For the record, though, the following review by Del Pike pretty much sums up how three of us sitting on the front row (myself, and friends Joe and Annette) felt about it. Continue reading “Donovan at the Phil: disappointing and bizarre”→
One Saturday morning some time in the mid-1980s, when home-grown art works and photographs were displayed for sale on the railings outside the Bluecoat Arts Centre, I bought this moody photo, taken in 1984, of the Seacombe ferry arriving at the old wooden landing stage at Pier Head. It’s either early morning or a late winter afternoon. Shot by a photographer who has signed the print, but whose signature I can’t decipher, this iconic image has hung in our hall since we moved in here some thirty years ago. Continue reading “Razzle Dazzle on the Mersey”→
I was going to write something about the Beatles festival on BBC 2 at the weekend – the first TV screening of Magical Mystery Tour since 1967, an Arena documentary about the making of the film, plus a workmanlike survey by Stuart Maconie of the cultural context of the Beatles first release, Love Me Do, in 1962. But Fred Garnett has done such an excellent job on his blog that I thought I’d simply repost his superb survey of this cultural artefact that
captured the spirit of its time and, yet again, provided another cultural breakthrough … this surreal slice of English holiday nostalgia inspired by The Goons … a fantastic cheery summer of love trip …
Suffice it for me to say that this overview rivals the Arena documentary for its musical perceptiveness, noting that
it was fuelled by several factors as well as a belief in the value of the psychedelic consciousness, not least being nostalgia for the good old days out of their childhood.
whilst at the same time
It responded to many aspects of the sixties avant-garde (it’s real crime I guess); surrealism, Goonery, experimentation, playing with form.
Best of all, Fred reminds us of that great overlooked psychedelic masterpiece, ‘It’s All Too Much’, which ranks alongside the Beatles greatest psychedelia – Strawberry Fields Forever, I Am The Walrus, Tomorrow Never Knows, and Rain.
One last thing … Fred he mentions a really interesting TV programme, presented by musical expert Howard Goodall, in which he analyses the technical reasons why The Beatles were so great. Watch it in six parts on YouTube here.
Footnote: Jarvis Cocker on The Beatles:
The whole point of the Beatles is that they were ordinary. Four working-class boys from Liverpool who showed that not only could they create art that stood comparison with that produced by “the establishment” – they could create art that pissed all over it. From the ranks of the supposedly uncouth, unwashed barbarians came the greatest creative force of the 20th century. It wasn’t meant to be that way. It wasn’t officially sanctioned. But it happened – and that gave countless others from similar backgrounds the nerve to try it themselves. Their effect on music and society at large is incalculable.
According to Robert McCrum, writing in The Observer last week, ‘the 60s arrived with the sound of a bluesy ‘dockside harmonica’: the launch of ‘Love Me Do’ on Friday 5 October. The Beatles’ raw working-class candour, mixed with Lennon’s riff, went into the nation’s teenage bloodstream like a drug. Well, we do love our anniversaries, and journalists love a neat turning point.
But it didn’t seem like that at the time – and anyway ‘Love Me Do’ didn’t enter the charts until 15 December, rose only to number 17 and remained in the Top 20 for only two weeks. I had turned 14 that year, addicted to Radio Luxembourg and the pop charts. My memory – for what it’s worth – is that ‘Love Me Do’, while interesting and catchy, didn’t stand out that much from a lot of the other stuff in the charts at the time. It was to be another five years before I came to Liverpool as an undergraduate, but for older teenagers already familiar with the Beatles’ shows at the Cavern, ‘Love Me Do’ was a pale shadow of what they sounded like live.
In fact, the week that ‘Love Me Do’ was released the nation’s teenagers were getting high on the space-age sound of ‘Telstar’ by The Tornados, the record named after the Telstar, the first communications satellite, which had been launched into orbit on 10 July that year. Written and produced by Joe Meek, the effects were created in Meek’s recording studio in a small flat above a shop in Holloway Road, North London. Coincidentally, Our World, the first live, international television broadcast to be relayed by satellite, which was broadcast on 25 June 1967 to what was the largest worldwide TVaudience ever at the time, featured The Beatles performing ‘All You Need Is Love’.
Back in December 1962 when ‘Love Me Do’ entered the charts, the big hits were ‘Lovesick Blues’ by Frank Ifield, ‘Swiss Maid’ by Del Shannon and Elvis’s ‘Return To Sender’ – The Beatles first single sounded fresher than that lot. John Lennon’s wailing harmonica, the first sound we heard on ‘Love Me Do’, was unusual but not unprecedented – it sounded a lot like the one on Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey Baby’ that had risen to number 2 back in April. The harmonica on that record had been played by Delbert McClinton; the Beatles shared a bill with Channel and McClinton at the Tower Ballroom in Wallasey on 21 June 1962.
What I’m getting at here is that, unless you had seen The Beatles live, at the end of 1962 they sounded good – but not that good. All that changed in March 1963 when ‘Please Please Me’ roared up the charts. What I really remember, in the months of Beatlemania that followed, is the truly shocking, raw sound of ‘She Loves You’ and ‘Twist and Shout’ blasting from the radiogram as we listened to Two-Way Family Favourites on the Light Programme. That’s when the sixties began.
According to Ian Macdonald’s brilliant and vital Revolution In The Head, ‘Love Me Do’ was made up by McCartney while sagging off from the Liverpool Institute four years earlier. He wasn’t sure how to finish it and showed it to Lennon, who may have contributed the ‘rudimentary middle eight’. The song was recorded – along with awful Mitch Murray song, ‘How Do You Do It’ (eventually palmed off on Gerry Marsden’s outfit) – in EMI’s Abbey Road studios on 4 September 1962.
George Martin was producing, and liked the sound – apart from Ringo’s drumming, the problem being that his drumming was actually looser than was considered acceptable at the time. So it was re-recorded a week later with an EMI session musician on drums.
Despite what I’ve said about my memory of hearing ‘Love Me Do’ at the time, Ian Macdonald averred that it sounded ‘the first faint chime of a revolutionary bell. A new spirit was abroad: artless yet unabashed – and awed by nothing’. I’ve come across no better description of the spirit of the sixties.
Fifty years ago today, on 9 March 1962, Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut album was released. Dylan had arrived in New York only 14 months earlier and was still three months short of his 20th birthday. The songs on Bob Dylan consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with two original compositions. The album made little impact, selling only 5,000 copies in its first year, just enough to break even. Dylan had been signed to Columbia Records by the legendary producer John Hammond, and some at the company began referring to Dylan as ‘Hammond’s Folly’ suggesting that Dylan’s contract should be ended.
I swung onto my old guitar Grabbed hold of a subway car And after a rocking, reeling, rolling ride I landed up on the downtown side Greenwich Village
I walked down there and ended up In one of them coffee-houses on the block Got on the stage to sing and play Man there said, “Come back some other day You sound like a hillbilly We want folk singers here”
Well, I got a harmonica job, begun to play Blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day I blowed inside out and upside down The man there said he loved m’ sound He was ravin’ about how he loved m’ sound Dollar a day’s worth
And after weeks and weeks of hangin’ around I finally got a job in New York town In a bigger place, bigger money too Even joined the union and paid m’ dues
– ‘Talkin’ New York’
Yesterday in an article in The Observer marking the anniversary, Ed Vulliamy wrote:
The immediately astonishing impact of the album, by any measure, is the contrast between the image of the unsmiling but fresh-faced lad in his cap and the depth of feeling and range in the singing between love, rage, sorrow and a fixation with death. The core of the album is ‘Fixin’ To Die’, sung as though he were pleading for the life he is about to lose, such is Dylan’s understanding of the intentions of its author, the great Delta blues master Booker T Washington – aka “Bukka” – White.
This is Dylan performing the song on a radio show and being interviewed by Cynthia Gooding on 11 March 1962:
Assessing the significance of the debut album, Vulliamy notes that
The estimable British writer on Dylan, Michael Gray, argues interestingly that the real value of the album is not only that it showed “more than a hint of a highly distinctive vision”, but also “served as a fine corrective for Greenwich Village: it was the opposite of effete,” he says, “in the context of what was happening at the time – American folk culture all but obliterated, and a stagnating ‘folk’ cult established as if in its place.”
Bruce Eder, reviewing the album for Allmusic, pinpoints what made Dylan’s debut album differ from the rest of the folk revivalists of the time:
A significant portion of the record is possessed by the style and spirit of Woody Guthrie, whose influence as a singer and guitarist hovers over “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “Pretty Peggy-O,” as well as the two originals here, the savagely witty “Talkin’ New York” and the poignant “Song to Woody” … But on other songs, one can also hear the influences of Bukka White, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, and Furry Lewis, in the playing and singing, and this is where Dylan departed significantly from most of his contemporaries. Other white folksingers of the era, including his older contemporaries Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Van Ronk, had incorporated blues in their work, but Dylan’s presentation was more in your face … There’s a punk-like aggressiveness to the singing and playing here. His raspy-voiced delivery and guitar style were modeled largely on Guthrie’s classic ’40s and early-’50s recordings, but the assertiveness of the bluesmen he admires also comes out, making this one of the most powerful records to come out of the folk revival of which it was a part. Within a year of its release, Dylan, initially in tandem with young folk/protest singers like Peter, Paul & Mary and Phil Ochs, would alter the boundaries of that revival beyond recognition, but this album marked the pinnacle of that earlier phase, before it was overshadowed by this artist’s more ambitious subsequent work.
Harold Lepidus at Examiner.com says the album shines even more today:
It has often been dismissed as a minor album, with only one “major” original composition – “Song To Woody.” For many fans, it was a late addition, something the “complete” their collection. Now, with a half-century of hindsight, the album comes across as a marvel. Dylan, who was twenty at the time, slams through the material with a reckless intensity, like a sort of folk punk, or an acoustic Billy Bragg. What many people don’t realize is that this was virtually unheard of at the time, especially on a major label.
At this time the world had Pete Seeger to gauge the spirit of folk. The family loving, working class, song of the people, serious folk man. Dylan was a new breed – he took what he needed from the traditionals and left their slowly cooked polish at the door, he didn’t take Seeger and co’s folk ideals seriously, and most importantly he possessed a cheek, a personality, and a spark that hadn’t been present on the politically/culturally driven folk records of the past. Folk was serious and selfless music and from the beginning Dylan was something more. He wasn’t interested in passing on old wisdom from gen to gen, he was instead concerned with using this genre and the stories of America in order to deliver something far more introspective and entirely of his own.
It’s ‘Song To Woody’ though that really signifies the arrival of Bob Dylan the songwriter, and really lives on as the lasting landmark from his debut record. Lyrically insightful and adoring of his hero,‘Song To Woody’ seems to lament the diminished state that Guthrie was in at the time, whilst at the same time reassuring him that it’s okay, someone has arrived to carry the dustbowl into a new world. That new world was indeed stumbling into existence in early 1962, and along with it was a man that would come to embody everything that the children of the revolution wanted from the 1960′s. Cometh the hour and cometh the boy from Minnesota on a freight train constructed in his own mind.
There are almost no Dylan originals on YouTube (his office must be exceedingly diligent in squashing any uploads), but if you search for ‘Song To Woody’, you do find this treasure: in May 1970, shortly after The Beatles broke up, Bob Dylan and George Harrison recorded this version in New York with Charlie Daniels on bass:
Apart from marking the release of his first album, 1962 was significant for young Bob Zimmerman in two other respects. In August 1962 he legally changed his name to Bob Dylan, while a few weeks earlier he wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, the song that would see him break through to a much wider audience. In Down the Highway, Howard Sounes wrote:
Bob composed ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in a matter of minutes sitting in a cafe across the street from the Gaslight Club. Although he thought ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ special, he did not understand the full significance of what he had done. ‘It was just another song I wrote.’ The melody was uncannily similar to the African-American spiritual ‘No More Auction Block.’ However, borrowing melodies, and even lyrics, was part of the folk tradition and thus perfectly acceptable. A more pertinent criticism of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ concerned the rhetorical lyrics. Many of the most distinguished folk artists in New York were underwhelmed when they first heard the song. There seemed no link between the relentless questions; and, at the end of three verses, none of the questions had been resolved, except to say the answer was blowing in the wind, an image so vague that, arguably, it meant nothing.
Pete Seeger did not regard it highly. ‘ “Blowin’ in the Wind” is not my favorite,’ he says. ‘It’s a little easy.’ Tom Paxton found it almost impossible to learn. ‘I hate the song myself. It’s what I call a grocery-list song where one line has absolutely no relevance to the next line.’ Dave Van Ronk thought it dumb. Still, within a couple of months of Bob performing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ at Gerde’s Folk City, Van Ronk noticed to his surprise that musicians hanging around Washington Square Park had invented irreverent parodies such as, ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ out your end.’ As Van Ronk says, ‘If the song is strong enough, without even having been recorded, to start garnering parodies, the song is stronger than I realized.'[His manager], meanwhile, knew Bob had created something extraordinary. ‘ “Blowin’ in the Wind” was the key to it all,’ he says. ‘That song made it all happen.’ …
On July 30, 1962, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ the song that was the foundation stone of Bob’s career and a catalyst of the singer-songwriter revolution, was copyrighted to M. Witmark & Sons. The same day, [Dylan’s new manager Albert] Grossman signed what Bob later called ‘a secret deal’ with M. Witmark & Sons giving Grossman fifty percent of Witmark’s share of the publishing income generated by any songwriter he brought to the company. Now Grossman stood to earn a substantial slice of Bob’s publishing fees, over and above the [20 percent] cut he took for managing him. This backhanded deal was one of Bob’s primary complaints when he and Grossman were in legal dispute in the 1980s, although in fairness Grossman was getting an enhanced part of Witmark’s share, and not necessarily money Bob himself would have received. Bob claimed indignantly that he had known nothing of Grossman’s fifty percent deal with M. Witmark & Sons (Grossman insisted he had told him). Bob also claimed to have had no idea Grossman was given as much as $100,000 to advance to him for signing with M. Witmark & Sons, of which he received one percent. Bob’s attorneys asserted that Grossman had ‘willfully and maliciously’ concealed vital information. The secretiveness was what angered Bob who was, of course, a very secretive person himself.
However, this was not the end of Grossman’s machinations. The last part of his plan was, in fact, the cleverest. If Peter, Paul and Mary [a group Grossman had created] had a hit with a Bob Dylan-Witmark song, Grossman would earn fourfold. He had his management fee from the two acts, plus his twenty-five percent of Peter, Paul and Mary’s recording income from Warner Bros., plus fifty percent of the income Witmark earned from publishing a Dylan song. When Peter, Paul and Mary had a massive hit with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ and top-forty success with two further songs written by Dylan, Grossman became as rich as Croesus. Suddenly, money had become very important.
Bob Dylan performing at the Singers Club Christmas Party in London, 22 December 22 1962.
In the first week of October 1962, the Beatles’ first single ‘Love Me Do’ was released, reaching number 17 in the UK charts. I can clearly remember that, and in my memory the whole Beatles phenomenon precedes my discovery of Dylan. I’m pretty certain that it was June 1963 before I registered the name of Bob Dylan, when Peter Paul and Mary released their hit version of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. Then, a couple of months later listening to radio coverage of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, I heard Dylan sing probably for the first time.
Dylan had actually visited London in December 1962, to appear in a BBC TV drama, The Madhouse on Castle Street. At the end of the play, Dylan performed ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, but I never saw that – we didn’t have a TV at the time. While in London, Dylan performed at several London folk clubs, and learned new songs from British folk singers such as Martin Carthy. One of the songs he picked up from Carthy was the ballad Lord Randall’, on which Dylan based the tune of ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, the standout track on his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released in May 1963.
Fifty years ago today Bob Dylan released his first album, Bob Dylan, on Columbia. Within 12 months he was a rising star; twelve months more and he was the voice of the times; a little over a year later he had gone from saviour to Judas. And on it went. For half a century now successive generations have wrestled with Dylan’s mutations; mostly we pick and choose and settle for – at best – a partial understanding. At the age of 70, Dylan’s appeal is still wrapped up in mystery, mischief and contradiction.
Hailed initially as the king of folk-protest thanks to anthems such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, the enduring image of Dylan as the great liberal voice of the Sixties is a clear anomaly within the context of his 50-year career. His social conscience was largely a creative convenience (like most young men he wrote primarily to impress girls, in his case his politically engaged girlfriend Suze Rotolo) which swiftly turned into a millstone. He realised early on that deification by the liberal literati was a short road to fossilisation and swiftly resigned his post; the coruscating “Positively Fourth Street”, released in 1965, still stands as the greatest ever abdication note set to music. Instead, Dylan has preferred to stir the mind, heart and senses with opaque poetry rather than ideology. […]
Since his critical and creative regeneration in the early Nineties – which began with two wonderful acoustic folk albums, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, and was sealed by the superb Time Out of Mind – Dylan has removed all traces of modernity from his work. His last four records have been composed entirely from the music of the earlier parts of the last century, touching on jazz, swing, country, Fifties rock’n’roll, folk and most often blues. His lyrics nowadays are an incongruous mix of sulphurous End Times impressionism, sly romance and sexual humour, all of which suggests that Dylan is having plenty of fun while simultaneously believing that the world has gone to hell in a handcart.
I got born into the material world Getting worn out in the material world Use my body like a car, Taking me both near and far Met my friends all in the material world
Walk a mile or so from where I live, across the park that locals call the Mystery, and you will arrive outside 12 Arnold Grove, the small terraced house where George Harrison was born in 1943. Here, for me, is another mystery: how did this boy from a family of working class Catholic Liverpudlians come not only to be a member of a musical partnership that changed the world, but also to embrace the spiritualism of Hinduism, Indian philosophy, culture, and music.
Strangely, this is not a question that Martin Scorsese seeks to explore in his sympathetic , sprawling documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World which I watched at FACT the other evening. There is next to nothing about Harrison’s early life in the film, except for a few shots of the blitz and wartime destruction in the opening minutes. Instead, the closest Scorcese comes to pursuing the thread of a unifying idea is, as the title suggests, to tentatively explore how Harrison balanced his intense spirituality with his life in the ‘material world’ – the hedonistic lifestyle of a rock musician, property-owner, businessman and tax-payer; a sensualist deeply attractive to women, and a man who loved fast cars.
But Scorcese, though incorporating interviews with a great many who knew Harrison (including his wife and son, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and many other musicians) doesn’t probe too deeply. Tricky issues are raised, but rather superficially. Beatles press chief Derek Taylor and his wife Joan talk about Harrison’s battles with addiction; Eric Clapton recalls the love triangle between Harrison, himself and Pattie Boyd; while McCartney speaks of the tensions between himself and Harrison as the Beatles began to drift apart. But Living In The Material World pulls back from really delving into these aspects of Harrison’s life, instead building a sympathetic portrait of a gentle and quiet man, much-loved by family and friends, and one who constantly questioned the nature of his existence.
Watch out now, take care Beware of falling swingers Dropping all around you The pain that often mingles In your fingertips Beware of darkness
This is an epic film – four hours with intermission at a cinema screening – and, like No Direction Home which dealt with Dylan, Scorcese’s aim seems to be to gather together the definitive document of the man’s career, incorporating interviews as well as beautifully restored archival footage. It’s successful in that respect, skilfully edited to yield a strong narrative drive from the mass of material (although I did wonder, in the absence of any narration or very many captions, how easy certain sections – such as Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann talking about the Hamburg days – would be to follow if you hadn’t lived through this stuff or were not au fait with all things Beatles).
There’ll come a time when all of us must leave here Then nothing sister Mary can do Will keep me here with you As nothing in this life that I’ve been trying Could equal or surpass the art of dying
Harrison is intriguing for the intensity of his spiritual yearnings, expressed in his music and his quest to absorb the principles of eastern thought. For a short period at least, he brought the Beatles under the influence of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, and he came to accept their teaching that the material world is maya, an illusionary state that should not be the final goal in life, but an opportunity to prepare for a good death. Scorcese explores this aspect of Harrison in some depth, and reveals how his spiritual values affected his attitude to the attack and stabbing by an intruder in his home and his final losing battle with cancer.
Martin Scorsese has spoken of hearing Harrison’s All Things Must Pass for the first time, of ‘the overwhelming feeling of taking in that all glorious music for the first time. It was like walking into a cathedral. George was making spiritually awake music – we all heard and felt it – and I think that was the reason that he came to occupy a very special place in our lives’.
There’s a crucial scene in the film which focusses on a letter Harrison, aged 22, wrote to his parents while in India in 1965 with the other Beatles studying meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In the letter, George says the Beatles had been lucky to acquire early in their lives so many of the material goods that most people spend their entire lives yearning for – because as a consequence, they had learned relatively young how hollow material success can be:
I know that this isn’t it. I knew I was going to be famous, but now I know I can reach the real top of what man can achieve, which is self-realization.
The second half of the film explores Harrison’s solo career, his financial backing for the Python’s Life of Brian and the subsequent emergence of Handmade Films, and his involvement in the Travelling Wilburys, before dealing with the struggle with cancer and his near-fatal stabbing in 1999. The events of that dreadful night are remembered by Olivia Harrison, who tells in terrifying detail of the attack that left her husband with multiple knife wounds and a collapsed lung. She wielded a poker to subdue the assailant, and recalls how later at the hospital she and George were shaken by how fiercely they had fought, almost in defiance of their spiritual values.
There’s a strong sense in the film of the friendships that Harrison forged – with musicians, obviously, but with others in the fields of comedy, motor racing and film. All speak of George with tremendous affection. There’s Tom Petty remembering the day that George dropped by and left him a great many ukeleles; Ringo admitting his bafflement at Harrison’s new love for eastern music and recalling the time while recording Abbey Road when Harrison brought in the tune for ‘Here Comes the Sun’:
He infused Indian musical technique into songs where people normally wouldn’t recognize it. In ‘Here Comes the Sun’, there were seven beats, not the usual three or four beats for the drum’s rhythm. George comes in and says ‘Oh, I’ve got this song, it’s in 7 and a half time’. He might as well have talked to me in Arabic.
It’s Ringo, too, who produces the most moving moment of the film. He recalls how, when George’s cancer returned, he flew to Switzerland where George was being treated. George was very ill, unable to lift himself from his bed. Ringo sat with him for a while, but then had to explain to George that he must leave him to fly to New York where his daughter was facing an operation for a brain tumour. With tears in his eyes, Ringo recalls George’s response – the last words he would hear from his lips – ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Tears and sniffles throughout the cinema.
In 12 Arnold Grove, the only heating was from one coal fire, and the house was so cold in winter that George and his brothers dreaded getting up in the morning. The toilet was outside in the yard. The house had tiny rooms – ten feet square – and a small iron cooking stove in the back room, which was used as the kitchen. George described the back yard as having ‘a one-foot wide flower bed, a toilet, a dustbin fitted to the back wall and a little hen house where we kept cockerels’. George also said:
Try and imagine the soul entering the womb of a woman living at 12 Arnold Grove, Wavertree, Liverpool 15. There were all the barrage balloons, and the Germans bombing Liverpool. All that was going on. I sat outside the house a couple of years ago, imagining 1943, nipping through the spiritual world, the astral level, getting back into a body in that house. That really is strange when you consider the whole planet, all the planets there may be on a spiritual level. How do I come into that family, in that house at that time, and who am I anyway?
In January I noted that it was 50 years since Bob Dylan arrived in New York, at the start of a year in which his musical and personal trajectory progressed at a rapid pace. Dylan soon emerged as the quintessential voice of the sixties, but there was another sound that will forever define that decade – that of the Beatles. And, in one of those strange historical coincidences, today marks the 50th anniversary of the the Beatles’ first ever performance at the Cavern. So, at around the same time that Dylan was visiting Woody Guthrie in Greystone hospital, on this side of the Atlantic four greasy, leather-jacketed scousers were thrashing out covers of rock ‘n’ roll standards by the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly. It was the start of a journey that would see the Beatles become the most popular band in the world, often trading ideas and influences back and forth with Dylan.
The Beatles had served their time in the nightclubs of Hamburg before they mounted the stage of the Cavern that February lunchtime, nevertheless it had been difficult getting a booking at the popular Cavern. It was Pete Best’s mum who begged Ray McFall, the owner, for a lunchtime slot for the group.
In The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney recalled: ‘The Cavern was sweaty, damp, dark, loud and exciting . As usual, we didn’t start out with much of an audience, but then people began to hear about us. We could always entertain them’.
John Lennon had played occasionally at the Cavern with his skiffle group The Quarrymen back in 1957. For the Anthology, he recalled: ‘In those old Cavern days half the thing was just ad lib; what you’d call comedy. We just used to mess about, jump into the audience, do anything’. George Harrison remembered: ‘We’d play from noon till about two. It was very casual; we’d have our tea and sandwiches and cigarettes on stage, sing a couple of songs and tell a few jokes’.
The Beatles at The Cavern with Pete Best on drums, 1961
The Cavern Club had opened in Mathew Street in January 1957. Its aim was to put Liverpool on the map as having the best jazz cellar in the country, outside of London. The opening act was the Merseysippi Jazz Band and the club soon became a focal point for jazz enthusiasts.
The early years of the Cavern also coincided with the skiffle craze, sparked by the release of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’ in 1956. Skiffle was big in Liverpool, and the lunchtime sessions were introduced in April 1957 in response to the skiffle boom. Most of the big names in the Liverpool music scene of the early sixties could trace their roots back to the skiffle period. The Quarrymen Skiffle Group, featuring John Lennon, made their first appearance at the Cavern on Wednesday 7 August 1957. A week earlier Ringo Starr made his debut with the Eddie Clayton Skiffle group. Paul McCartney made his debut at the Cavern on 24 January 1958 with the Quarrymen. George Harrison’s first appearance was at the lunchtime session on 9 February 1961.
The Beatles (with Pete Best at drums) playing the Cavern Club, December 1961
For their first show the Beatles were paid £5 to share between them. It was George Harrison’s first time on the Cavern stage, as it was for Stuart Sutcliffe. Harrison arrived in blue jeans, which were banned from the club, but he managed to convince the bouncer that he was one of the performers.
In his book, The Cavern, Spencer Leigh quotes Ray McFall, Cavern Club owner as saying:
They were different and they were very well rehearsed because they had come back from three months of torture in Hamburg. The other groups were like Cliff Richard and the Shadows, but The Beatles’ music was so vibrant… However, I didn’t like them wearing jeans which were taboo in the Cavern. Our doormen would stop anyone wearing jeans. I felt that if people were wearing good, clean clothes they would be more likely to behave themselves as they wouldn’t want them getting dirty and damaged.
For the next three years the Cavern was the fount of Merseybeat, the sound that swept the world. During that period, the Beatles made a total of 292 appearances at the Cavern. Their last show was on 3 August 1963.
The Beatles: ‘Some Other Guy’ at the Cavern in 1962
That's How The Light Gets In 