—“Street Fighting Man”

The ballroom in Scotland’s Alloa Town Hall is huge, beautiful—and packed. Larry Parnes has sent the Silver Beatles on a ten-day tour of Scotland as a backing band to Johnny Gentle. The group performs three songs, two of which are Elvis numbers—“Teddy Bear” and “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”—and then the headliner makes his entrance. True to his name, he’s quiet and relaxed. They play behind him for half an hour.

It’s a disaster.

*  *  *

“We were crummy, horrible,” George says as they’re packing up their equipment. “An embarrassment.”

George isn’t wrong.

Worse, they find out that one of the local promoters called Parnes to complain: “They’re a scruffy no-good group.”

Johnny Gentle, though, seems okay. A ship’s carpenter, he built his own guitar, and he can write songs. While they’re in Inverness, he shows John and George an unfinished song of his, which “was fine up to the middle-eight.”

John helps him with the lyrics.

Now the song flows.

“That’s great,” Johnny says, impressed. “I’m going to use it.”

They’ve been promised £75 for the gig, and it hasn’t come through. They sleep in the van; one night in a hayloft. It’s a miserable week, but “a vital experience for us,” Paul later says, “because after that we knew it was no breeze—you’d have to work hard and sort out where the money was coming from. It taught us a lot of lessons.”

Ten days later, they arrive back home. John gets the results of his exams. Not only did he fail, he also got a “red letter” from the Liverpool College of Art that says, “Don’t bother coming back next September.”

Mimi is shattered. Her view of John’s future is blacker than ever.

Paul, too, is facing pressure. His father wants him to go get a job. Same with George, who lost his electrician apprenticeship when he left for Scotland.

“Well,” Paul says when they all get together, in the early days of August, “what are we going to do?”

Allan Williams comes to them a week later, on August 11, 1960.

“Good news, lads. The Silver Beatles are going to play in Hamburg, Germany.”

He sets one tough condition. “No drummer, no trip.”

Paul has a solution. “What about the son of the owner of the Casbah Club?”

“Pete Best?” John asks.

Paul nods. “He’s got his own drum kit.”

Eighteen-year-old Pete is clearly a beginner, but “he could keep one beat going for long enough,” says John.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

When I left my home and my family

I was no more than a boy…

—“The Boxer”

They arrive in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district around midnight, after traveling by ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and then by van to Germany.