The week the Beatles arrived back in Liverpool the first issue of Mersey Beat went on sale with John’s history of the group on the second page. For a writer there is little as thrilling as seeing your work in print for the first time, and he was no exception. Collecting together all kinds of poems, short stories and cartoons from his bedroom drawer at Mendips, he took them round to Bill Harry’s little Mersey Beat office in Liverpool’s Renshaw Street. ‘Print whatever you like,’ he told Harry. And, leaving the pieces with him, he agreed to contribute a column for every issue of the newspaper.
One part of his career was safely off and running. The other quickly resumed as Ray McFall wanted the Beatles in the Cavern at lunchtimes and again one night a week, while Mona Best, and a couple of other promoters, were filling most of their other nights at clubs and ballrooms around Merseyside.
It was an exciting, and yet frustrating, time. Within a few months there would even be a Beatles Fan Club, and they were enjoying their music and gigs like never before. But outside Merseyside, the group remained completely unknown. They needed a manager, but because of their reputation for being difficult, no one was prepared to take them on. Mona Best might have been a possibility, but that wouldn’t have worked with her son Pete in the band. Besides, things were delicate at the Casbah. Technically Neil Aspinall, now the Beatles’ road manager, was a lodger at Mona’s house, but, at twenty-one, he had also become the lover of Pete’s extremely attractive thirty-eight-year-old mother who was separated from her husband.
For their part, the Beatles would continue to play at the Cavern at lunchtimes and loaf around town all afternoon, maybe in the Grapes pub or the Kardomah café in Stanley Street. Best of all, though, was when they would squeeze into a booth at the NEMS record shop around the corner in Whitechapel and play both sides of the new American releases – sometimes arguing with one another about who would sing what. In this way John laid claim to Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’, which he would finally record himself over a decade later on his solo Rock ’n’ Roll album.
Some gigs would be better than others, and, along with other Liverpool groups, an all-nighter of a Riverboat Shuffle on the Royal Iris as it sailed out of the Mersey into Liverpool Bay in late August was a favourite. John enjoyed these sessions when musicians from several different bands would all join in. ‘Sometimes we’d go on with fifteen or twenty musicians and play together, and we’d create something that had never been done on stage by a group before,’ he would say years later when such co-operation began to be a regular occurrence at rock charity shows.
It was all very ad hoc, but, as pleasant as it was, it wasn’t leading anywhere. Something new had to happen.
That summer Cynthia’s widowed mother had gone to Canada to stay with relatives and their house in Hoylake had been let, so it had seemed a good idea for Cynthia to become another of Mimi’s lodgers. It was actually a terrible idea. When John was living at home, Mimi would always wait up for him, and she didn’t take kindly to now finding Cynthia also waiting . . . and in her nightdress, too, which, overlooking her own secret liaison with one of her past lodgers, she deemed provocative.
According to Cynthia, Mimi was a demanding landlady, but this uneasy situation went on for several months, with Cynthia working at Woolworths during breaks from college, and going to wherever the Beatles were playing in the evenings. Obviously, there would be no opportunities for any hanky-panky at Mendips, not when Mimi was at home, anyway. It was a difficult time all round.
John was going to be twenty-one on 9 October 1961. In those days a young man of that age was considered old enough to be taking on responsibilities, and not, as Mimi would never cease to tell him, ‘touting around stupid dance halls for £3 a night! Where’s the point in that?’
Despite himself, he did listen to her. ‘I wasn’t too keen on reaching twenty-one,’ he would say. ‘A voice in me was saying, “Look, you’re too old.” I was thinking that I’d missed the boat, that you had to be seventeen. A lot of stars in America were kids. I remember one of my relatives saying to me, “From now on, it’s all downhill.”’
It’s unlikely that the doom-mongering relative was Mimi’s sister Aunt Mater or Uncle Bert, because in an act of great generosity the two presented John with a coming-of-age birthday present of £100 – the equivalent of over £2,000 in today’s money.
There were several things John could have done with £100. He could have deposited it safely in a savings account at the bank where it would have accrued interest. Or he could have paid off his hire purchase debts on his guitar and amplifier. He also might have taken Cynthia away for a romantic few days. He did none of those things.
Instead he planned a month’s holiday hitch-hiking to Spain with Paul. In the event they only got as far as two weeks in Paris and they went by train. Cynthia was upset, but was too timid to complain. But George and Pete were furious, and not just because they’d been excluded – although George would have felt that strongly. The Beatles had several appearances already booked for the time when John and Paul were away, and it was left to George and Pete to apologise to the clubs that their two colleagues had let down.
Through his letters to and from Stuart in Hamburg, John knew that a German friend, Jürgen Vollmer, was now living in Paris, where he was working as a photographer’s assistant. So, having booked into a small hotel in Montmartre, John and Paul quickly hooked up with him. As they’d realised in Hamburg, Vollmer was an evangelist for French style, and, as they toured the sights, they probably fell in love ten times a day as they passed a never-ending array of the beautiful, sophisticated young women of Paris. As John would tell Playboy in 1980, and as poets had been discovering and rediscovering for hundreds of years, Paris breathed romance. ‘All the kissing and holding . . . it was so romantic the way people would just stand under the tree kissing. They weren’t mauling each other, they were just kissing. To be there and see them . . . I really loved it.’
When they’d arrived in France in their black leather jackets, black jeans and quaffed greasy hair they’d looked like a couple of bikers from Liverpool, and, dressed like that, they found themselves invisible to the self-regarding bohemian girls they fancied. One look at Jürgen showed them their problem. Jürgen, like Astrid and now Stuart, combed his hair forward in the French style. So now John and Paul wanted their hair cut like Jürgen’s, and in his small hotel bedroom the photographer’s assistant became a style-creating hairdresser. It wasn’t his idea, because he liked the Beatles’ rocker look. But they reckoned that with a haircut like his, ‘they’d have more chance with the bohemian beauties on the Left Bank,’ as Jürgen told Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn. As they never told whether their new hairstyle worked as they’d hoped, it probably didn’t. But it would come to the aid of millions of other boys in a couple of years’ time.
There were some sniggers when they got back to Liverpool, but George quickly joined them and combed his hair forward. Only Pete couldn’t be persuaded. He was the best-looking of them all and he liked the way he looked – ‘Liverpool’s answer to Jeff Chandler’, as Mersey Beat described him.
Poor Pete, unclubbable and unassuming, he never really fitted in. It wasn’t so much that the others left him out when they were off stage, as he didn’t necessarily want to be included. He was just different from them, and now his hair looked different, too.