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| Photo of three Beatles at the Cavern is for auction at the Liverpool Beatles memorabilia auction |
The Place Where It all Began
By Cheryl Hillman
Datebook magazine:
Fall 1964
I’d like to tell you
about Liverpool, the city of beat – Beatlesville, as we call it. I am a seventeen year old English girl and I
live, literally, in the heart of the beat scene. My brother went to school with John Lennon,
Paul McCartney lives just a few roads away from us, and the Cavern Club, the
place where it all started, is a short bus ride away.
Since the Beatles first visited America, you have been
flooded with descriptions of Liverpool tales of Gerry and the Pacemakers, the
Searchers, and all the other groups. My
story is not just an account of the Mercy beat scene – anybody could give you
that. What I want to do is take you down
to the centre of it all and tell you about the groups, as they really are, and
show you what life is like, beat wise for us teenagers who live in Beat City.
The centre of it all is 10 Mathew Street. This is the Cavern Club, a series of black
cellars underneath a dirty, disused warehouse.
It is situated in a narrow back-street in the centre of Liverpool. The pavement outside the warehouse is very narrow,
and when we are queuing for the lunchtime session (noon-2:15) we have to watch
out for the large lorries, piled high with crates and boxes trying to squeeze
past each other.
When a good group is on, their fans start waiting
early. For the Beatles we used to sleep
outside all night, and if a group like the Escorts is appearing we go down at
about 7 o’clock in the morning. During
the dinner hour there are only one or two groups on, but at night there are
often as many as five or six.
Some people wonder how we have the patience to stand around
so long. The truth is that it isn’t a
bit boring because there is always so much going on outside the Cavern. Somebody usually has a mouth organ, and we
talk and pass around snapshots that people have taken of the group.
The fans of various groups usually clan together, especially
if they follow their group around and form what we call a sort of “family.” Each family “owns” a group and they usually
follow it around the Liverpool clubs and dance halls, and sometimes around the
country.
There are often people outside the Cavern who have travelled
miles to get there and then waited all day to see the group, even in
winter. A while ago the Beatles were due
to play at the Cavern, but it was a foggy night and only Paul and Pete Best
(who was their drummer then) arrived.
The George came, but there was still no sign of John. At that time the group travelled in a little
red van, so Paul and Pete went out to find him, but they got lost in the fog!
One girl had been waiting all day to see them and she was so
disappointed that Bob Wooler (the resident disc jockey) brought her into the
band room to see George, who was sitting there waiting for the others to return
and wondering what on earth had happened to them.
“Darling,” said bob to the girl, “tell George what you think
of the Beatles for being late.”
Whereupon the girl just looked at George, gasped and crumpled up on the
floor in a flat faint!
There is a tremendous feeling of unity at the Cavern, and we
all help each other whenever it’s needed.
If a girl hasn’t got enough money to get in, for example, she just goes
down the queue and as many people as possible give a few pennies or
half-pennies until she has raised the money!
Boys and girls from other parts of the country and the U.S.
have heard about this sense of togetherness that we have, and they know about
the way we all help each other and show a great deal of hospitality to
visitors. Because of this whenever they
have a problem they write to a member of a Liverpool group and ask for
help.
The most sympathetic ones get bombarded with heartcries! Terry Sylvester, of the Escorts, got a
telephone call at 3 o’clock in the morning recently from two teenage girls who
were bored with life in London and wanted to come to Liverpool. They even asked if he could put them up in
his house! The poor boy didn’t want his
home turned into a hotel, so he advised them not to run away and told them that
they wouldn’t like life in dirty old Liverpool anyway.
Actually we were all rather relieved that they girls didn’t
just turn up on his doorstep, because Terry’s the kind-hearted sort who would
probably have taken them in – and his poor mother would have had a fit!
To get into the Cavern you have to go down a steep, narrow
flight of stone steps. The club was
originally a series of warehouse cellar and the only light (apart from the
lights above the small, wooden stage) comes from a few bare bulbs. There are some seats in front of the stage where
you can sit if you want to watch the group rather than dance.
It was on the Cavern stage that many of the top Mersey
groups made their debuts before they became famous outside Liverpool. It was here that the Beatles started.
George Harrison got a black-eye at the Cavern once. Someone hit him because Pete Best, who used
to be the drummer with the Beatles, had been thrown out and replaced by Ringo
Starr!
We often hand requests up to the groups on stage. Once three of us got a long roll of paper
(the sort of little roll that comes from a cash register) and filled the whole
of it with requests.
We wrote things like “We Made a heart-shaped cushion for you
– but we liked it so much that we decided to keep it for ourselves!” and “We
wrote a request on an elephant, but it died of anthrax.”
Then we handed it to the Kirkbys, who took about ten minutes
unrolling it and reading the reams and reams of paper.
After they had read it, Joey, the singer came to the
microphone and announced, “Some people have just handed us a toilet-roll and we’d
like to play this next number for them!”
The atmosphere at the Cavern is easy-going and
informal. When the Escorts were on stage
once a girl threw an orange at John Kinrade, the lead guitarist. John is rather quiet on stage, and we nearly
died of surprise when he picked it up and threw it back at her. Bob Wooler went mad and nearly banned the group
from the club for storming the audience!
Facilities for groups at the Cavern are inadequate (there is
only one, small, bandroom), but all of them agree that it was modernized it
would lose its atmosphere. However,
there have been some changes at the Cavern since it became famous.
A few weeks ago I remarked to one of the Denims that the
bandroom was much too small. “Yes, it is
really,” he said, “but you don’t want all mod cons in a place like this, do you? Blimey they even clean it now!”
The atmosphere at the Cavern is unique (as is the smell,
which is musty and sweaty) and it is this, perhaps more than anything else that
has made it the Mecca of teenagers all over England. Teenagers in other towns often tell us how
lucky we are to have the Cavern, and other beat-venues like it, and some of
them leave home and find jobs in Liverpool so as to be in on it all. There are no other clubs in England quite
like the ones we have here, so they are seldom disappointed with what they
find.
After the session, the top of the bill group has to get out
of the Cavern somehow. Once, when the
Escorts had finished a lunchtime session, hundreds of girls were waiting
outside for them. An exit has recently
been built at the side, and the group dived out of that. Meanwhile the van was standing outside the
front entrance to confuse the fans. This
was pretty hilarious for the road manager, who was loading the instruments into
the van and pretending that the boys were still in the Cavern. He was saying to the fans, “oh yes they’ll be
out soon.” And shouting down the steps into the empty club, “Stay down there
lads.”
But one girl saw them leaving by the side entrance, and the
fans gave chase. The poor Escorts,
without their van, were chased around the centre of Liverpool, in and out of
all stores, and had their clothes nearly torn off by the fans until the road
manager managed to catch up with them in the van!
Most of the groups, however, don’t have this trouble,
because many of their Liverpool fans are “regular”" who soon become
personal friends and would rather just stand and talk to them than try to cut
their hair off or grab their ties!
Groups like the Searchers and the Pacemakers have terrible trouble,
though, because they are out of town so much now that when their fans do see
them they go crazy!
Two New York girls recently tried to stow away to get over
to Liverpool to see the Cavern, and find out what it’s like down there. In a way, I wish that they had made I because
they would have been fascinated by it all.
The club is in a dirty back street and is rat infested, but
there’s nowhere like it on this earth.
Pete Best, the ex-Beatle who now leads the Pete Best four –
says that is a “dark, gloomy cellar with an electrifying atmosphere.”
Those words are so true!
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| This is Cheryl's own snapshot of Paul getting into his car outside of his house |
It did not all begin at the Cavern, it began at the Casbah Coffee Bar, owned by original drummer Pete Best's mother, Mona.
ReplyDeleteVery very true----but I guess in 1964 they wanted to make everyone believe that it all began at the Cavern. But we know better today.
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