So the Cavern got fuller and fuller, sweatier and sweatier and louder and louder, because eventually the duffle-coats left and they just took the place over.
And then the first thing that happens is this: we're doing this gig and John gets off the bus and he's got this huge box with like a red light on the top and it's a fifteen-watt amplifier, and we'd always known his guitar was electric but it just had this silver thing on it, you know, and a couple of little knobs that didn't do anything. He plugs it in and starts to play ELECTRIC GUITAR. Astonishing! Cos it's loud, you know? 'Cos before, you know, it was chanka chanka chanka and if the clientele got a bit ratty about it they could drown you out.... 'Rubbish! Get off!' But now you discover the secret of Status Quo and Rainbow .. . 'I'll be louder than they buggers!' BYOIOIOING!
The beat group evolved, largely unnoticed by the entertainment industry at large, in the five years between the death of skiffle and the explosion of Merseybeat. It was a product of technological change and musical frustration; do-it-yourself rock'n'roll for a generation that was denied access to the real thing.
It did not start in Liverpool; Merseybeat was a second-stage refinement of a formula which was already established. The first successful beat groups, outfits like Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Mike Berry and the Outlaws or Jimmy Powell and the Dimensions were already veterans of the dance-hall and package-tour circuits by the time the Beatles made their first record.
So why was Liverpool important? The answer has more to do with quantity than with quality. What was happening in Liverpool - and to a lesser extent in other cities (especially ports) - was a sudden vast increase in the number of young lads getting together to make music; that, in turn, came about because of the new availability of the instruments, amplification and the hire-purchase required.
What you ended up with was three guitars going into the same amp; the drummer is added and he's got a proper kit 'cos his dad's a headmaster, so you've got rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass guitar and drums. Then comes the rise of the P.A., 'cos for a long time you're stuck with whatever microphone and speaker the hall - the church hall or the pub or whatever it is - has. That's a great leap forward because the group now becomes self-contained. And now you buy a Transit 'cos it's too big for a car. The Ford Transit is the vehicle. You put the gear in the Transit, go off to the gig, put up the P. A., put up your mikes, plug in your amp, and you played...
There was a group every square yard in this city. The local scene was so vibrant, and just about every local area had two or three halls which could provide venues; I mean, venues was the name of the game. These people could live on a fiver a week, you know, as long as they could get a couple of turn-outs.
You know, everybody knew somebody who was playing in a group, so there was a kind of democratised stardom. People wanted to give you the chance as well; when you look at the histories of some of those local rock'n'roll groups, the aunties who came forward with the initial twenty quid! They wanted to give the kids a ride because everyone had just been through such a hard time, and that makes for people saying 'Oh, give him a guitar! We've just fought Hitler, for Chrissake! That's what we did it for!
By the summer of 1961, the group scene in Liverpool was already lively enough to support a weekly newspaper, Mersey-beat, and the established cellar clubs in the city were starting to book groups as well as jazz bands.
There were a lot of old jazz clubs in this town, like the Cavern and the Iron Door, where the long-hairs with long scarves and duffle coats and CND badges used to dance a strange dance to these boozed-up versions of New Orleans jazz bands. They weren't all that much good but people had a good time and those were the clubs that were taken over by the rising beat generation. But I think there was a fair frisson when the old clientele saw the Merseyssippi Seven moved over by Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Beatles and the Big Three.
The sound was such that it took you about twelve hours to recuperate. You know, when you came outside, you were talking to your mates and all you could see was mouths moving up and down, because you weren't going at twenty watts so you couldn't hear anything.
Just as technology had made possible the four-man self-contained rock'n'roll group, it now gradually began to change the style of the music. The development of the bass speaker cabinet in particular made the stomach-thumping beat of the bass guitar the dominant sound, above which all the other ingredients had to struggle to be heard. The group therefore needed a high-pitched, clanging lead guitar, a leather-throated lead vocal and two or three voices shouting out the choruses. Partly for this reason, and partly through the influence of black American vocal groups, two- or three-part harmony singing became a feature of the Mersey sound.
Virtually every song that every Liverpool group performed in the pre-Beatles gestation period was copied from an American record; hardly any of them had been British hits. From the point of view of the audiences, unfamiliar with the originals, it was as though the Liverpool groups had exclusive access to the best rock'n'roll songs ever written, and performed them the way they were meant to be performed.
The sailors arriving back in this town used to bring, along with the Fender guitars that you couldn't get anywhere else, a lot of songs on record that people didn't hear because they weren't in the pop charts here.
You were thrashing along in a pub and some bloke comes up and says ' Have you ever heard Chuck Berry?' You say ' Oh yeah, I heard him on Radio Luxembourg one time.' He says ' Here you are, here's an album. Fifteen bob.' You say ' Yeah, I'll have that!' And you go home and that one album is precious. You learned every note until you could play it exactly ...
There was a basic repertoire of fifteen or twenty songs that more or less every band would be doing, you know, things like the Coasters' 'Poison Ivy' and perhaps a bit of Chuck Berry, and you'd go and see the bands and they'd all be doing the same sort of stuff. You didn't really go expecting to be surprised.
These keen but limited rock'n'roll revivalists might have remained in this musical blind alley, had it not been for the changes that were taking place in American pop music during the early sixties. For years the British pop industry had kept itself going by providing teen idols who turned out cover versions of songs that were simultaneously being churned out by American teen idols; but now the US teen-dream scene was on its last legs and a new kind of music was coming through, of which the Craig Douglases and the Mark Wynters were unaware and which they couldn't have attempted anyway. The new sounds were coming from independent record companies like Berry Gordy's Detroit-based Tamla label. The Beatles were aware of this music and could make a passable attempt at reproducing it in their all-purpose bass-thump-and-tenor-harmonies style. In fact, thanks to their gruelling apprenticeship on the Hamburg club circuit, they could tackle almost anything from Carl Perkins rockabilly to 'A Taste of Honey', including material pinched from the Shirelles, Marvelettes, Donays, Miracles, Barrett Strong, Chuck Willis, Larry Williams, Isley Brothers, Arthur Alexander and many more; all great songs, all ranging from moderately to totally obscure.
It was this eclectic competence which gave the Beatles their head start. In itself it was not enough to sustain them as stars, and once they had broken through they switched gradually to songs they had written themselves. Their contemporaries who couldn't or wouldn't make this transition inevitably faded away, having opened the British market to the very sounds they were borrowing.
There was one more ingredient that was crucial, and it had to do with the relationship between the groups and their followers. Whereas previous musical idols had been remote, glamorous figures to their fans, the Mersey groups had evolved out of teenage gangs and still, in a sense, belonged to them.
When you saw the Beatles on stage there was a continuous kind of across-the-barriers banter going on. We used to throw toilet rolls at them and they used to throw them back.
Because they had arrived through sessions in pubs and clubs, it seemed natural for groups to wear their everyday dress on stage, to perform with a smouldering cigarette or glass of beer on top of the amplifier and to argue with the audience about which song they should do next. Their stage personalities were genuine, and this fact was as important to their later success as the music itself.
There really wasn't a great deal of attempt to put on a show. It was just fairly sweaty and direct and they just got up and played and stomped about a bit and the crowd did the same...
Jammed together on the Cavern's crowded dance-floor, the beat fans developed a new dance, the Cavern Stomp, an eyeball-to-eyeball shuffle in which the participants linked fingers and swayed their forearms like metronomes.
The clubs weren't licensed so there wasn't any booze; the main high was the music. And the guys in the band were just like you were: they probably had daytime jobs, they couldn't afford flash stage-gear - maybe suits or perhaps a prized plastic jerkin and a pink tab-collar shirt.
The Beatles' success (their second release, 'Please Please Me', went to number two in March 1963) focussed the attentions of the pop establishment on Merseyside. The record company representatives arrived clutching cheque books and Liverpool street-maps with Mathew Street marked by a cross. The realisation dawned that all Denmark Street had to do was take the groups, polish them up, render them a little less offensive and peddle the product. Its first instinct was to make the phenomenon fit the preconceived pattern, so it went for acts in two categories: the cheeky and the crooners. Gerry (of Gerry and the Pacemakers), Freddie (of Freddie and the Dreamers) and Herman (of Herman's Hermits) - the latter two both from Manchester - had all the cheeky charm that Tommy Steele had brought to bear in the first wave of rock'n'roll. Balladeers like Cilla Black and Billy J. Kramer fitted the alternative stereotype, with the additional qualification that they could claim acquaintance with the Fab Four.
For all these attempts to assimilate the beat groups to the Tin Pan Alley formula, some things did change for good as a result of the Merseybeat boom. The group became the standard unit of pop currency; a record's 'backing' became extremely important (so much so that 'I liked/didn't like the backing' became a 'Juke Box Jury' cliche). It became the exception rather than the rule for a group not to write its own material. New club and dance-hall circuits had been opened up which would supply a steady if exhausting living to anyone with a van-load of amplifiers and a modicum of talent. In short, the pop industry had been obliged to adjust to giving the fans what they wanted, rather than what it thought it could flog to them ... up to a point.
