Way Beyond Compare

1957–1962: Who Was to Know?

1. Concert J
Date: 6 July 1957
Time: 8:45–10:30 p.m.
Location: St. Peter’s Church Hall, Woolton, Liverpool
Producer: Bob Molyneux

[A.] Puttin’ on the Style (1:40)
[B.] Baby Let’s Play House (0:28)

What are the odds? Not that a sixteen-year-old John Lennon and a fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney would meet at a church fête and go on to conquer the music world, but that someone would be there to record Lennon’s band, the Quarry Men that very day. After all, of the dozens of shows the Quarry Men played from 1957–1959, this is the only one for which a tape has surfaced. Not only that, there are no other known recordings of a Beatle performing in front of an audience prior to 1962!

Without knowing the rich history behind it, the recording itself (or what we have of it) is distinctly underwhelming: the distant thumpa-thumpa of Colin Hanton’s drums and Len Garry’s tea-chest bass, with a higher-pitched but unmistakably nasal John Lennon vocal cutting through the murk. His and Eric Griffiths’ guitars, Pete Shotton’s washboard, and Rod Davis’ banjo are essentially inaudible, but judging by John’s vocal pitch, they performed both songs in the key of G major.

“Puttin’ On the Style” was a skiffle standard popularized by Lonnie Donegan, whose other numbers featured heavily in the Quarry Men’s repertoire (“John Henry,” “Railroad Bill,” “Diggin’ My Potatoes,” “Lost John,” “Cumberland Gap,” “Midnight Special,” and of course “Rock Island Line”). They also played a few rock numbers that day; John recalled singing Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” while Paul has said he heard John sing the Del-Vikings’ “Come Go with Me,” substituting his own words for the lyrics he hadn’t deciphered.

Maybe that explains why Paul was able to impress John by playing a word-perfect rendition of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” backstage between the Quarry Men’s two sets that day. In the afternoon, they had played outdoors, but moved inside the church hall for the grand dance that evening. Also attending the dance was amateur recording enthusiast Bob Molyneux, whose mother owned a shop in Woolton. He switched on his portable Grundig TK8 reel-to-reel machine and pointed the handheld microphone in the direction of the stage.

The tape captured performances by the George Edwards Band as well as their support act, the Quarry Men Skiffle Group. In the months afterward, Molyneux copied portions of the recordings to a separate 3-inch reel and erased the original tapes. By 1963, the Beatles were making a splash across Great Britain, and Molyneux checked the recordings to discover that two songs from the Quarry Men’s set had been preserved—“Puttin’ On the Style” and a rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Baby Let’s Play House.” He apparently tried to contact John (via Ringo) to see if he was interested in the tape, but never received a reply, so the tape went into storage for the next thirty years.

All three verses of “Puttin’ On the Style” have surfaced over the years, beginning with the second verse in 1994, in which John sings lyrics updated by Donegan to change the “pair of horses” and “whip” to a “hot-rod car” and “yellow gloves.” In 2007, on the fiftieth anniversary of the performance, BBC Radio aired the song’s first verse (played at a slower tempo), along with 28 seconds of “Baby Let’s Play House.” The final verse of “Puttin’ On the Style” appeared shortly thereafter, from an offline recording apparently taped at an EMI exhibit.

RELEASE HISTORY
1994: The Bob Molyneux tape, along with the Grundig reel-to-reel recorder used to tape it, was auctioned by Sotheby’s on September 15. EMI acquired the lot for £78,500, but neglected to release it as part of the Anthology CD or video projects. A poor-quality 27-second excerpt of A stems from a sample tape circulated to the media, which took a surprisingly long time to reach bootleg. It finally appeared on the 1998 bootleg CD Puttin’ On the Style.
2007: B and a further 29 seconds of A were broadcast on BBC Radio 2’s documentary The Day John Met Paul. The remaining 44 seconds of A surfaced online the same year, in truly dismal quality. Both songs appear on the CD-R Strong Before Our Birth.

2. Studio session
Date: spring–early summer 1958
Time: afternoon
Location: P. F. Phillips Studio, Liverpool
Producer: Percy Phillips

[A.] That’ll Be the Day (2:06)
[B.] In Spite of All the Danger (2:43)

Over the winter of 1957–58, various Quarry Men dropped out, while new guitarist Paul McCartney inducted his schoolmate George Harrison, the youngest but most musically dedicated band member. With Colin Hanton on drums and John “Duff” Lowe on piano, the core lineup of John, Paul, and George gathered outside the Hippodrome Cinema on a cold, wet morning midway through 1958.

Their destination was the nearby home of Percy Phillips, who had professional recording equipment installed in his drawing room, which he would operate for a small fee. The Quarry Men scraped together the necessary seventeen shillings and sixpence needed to cut a 78 rpm single. For one pound, they could have gone to tape first, which would have allowed for editing, but they opted for the budget method of recording directly onto a 10-inch shellac disc via an MSS disc-cutting machine.

For the A-side, they chose the first big hit from their idol Buddy Holly, “That’ll Be the Day,” with John singing lead, Paul harmonizing, and George playing the guitar solo (spurred on by a shout of “honky tonk!” from an unidentified Quarry Man). The B-side was an original composition: Paul’s “In Spite of All the Danger,” a ballad fashioned after Elvis Presley’s “Trying to Get to You.” It’s a charming performance, with John continually missing his vocal entrance cues, Paul adding “wah-wah” backing vocals, and George playing another solo (enough to garner him co-composer credit on Paul’s handwritten disc label).

The song actually ran on for 3:25, long enough to cause Mr. Phillips to signal the boys frantically that the disc was running out of room, but for release on Anthology 1, it’s been edited by 42 seconds (the edit removes a repeated verse and chorus). “Day” is performed in the key of A major, while “Danger” is in E, including the elusive B7 chord the Quarry Men had ridden clear across town to obtain.

When the disc was finished, they paid Phillips (though he later claimed they had only 15 shillings with them and had to pay the balance later) and secured the sole copy of the disc. John kept it first, and it passed from band member to band member, even getting broadcast over the PA at a local factory, before ending up in John Lowe’s linen drawer.

In July 1981, Lowe made noises about auctioning the disc but was served with an injunction by Paul to keep him from selling it until he could make an offer of his own. Lowe eventually accepted a generous amount, and Paul took possession, having copies made so the songs could be played without further degrading the valuable original. He played a segment of A on a TV documentary in 1985 (see release history), but it wasn’t until 1995 that the world would hear the full 

A-side and edited B-side. Portions played in the Anthology documentary do not suffer from the heavy noise reduction heard on the Anthology 1 CD.

RELEASE HISTORY
1985: On September 12, BBC TV’s Arena broadcast a documentary about Buddy Holly, coproduced by McCartney Productions, Ltd. Paul appeared on the show talking about his love for Holly and played a 70-second excerpt of A, strumming along on acoustic guitar. This source was copied the following year on the bootleg LP That’ll Be the Day: The Music That Inspired the Beatles.

1995: A and B were released on Anthology 1. The CD-R The Beatles Complete • July 6, 1957, to April–May 1960 (part 1) uses composites of both songs from this source and the versions on the Anthology soundtrack that haven’t been subjected to noise reduction.

3. Home demo
Date: ca. April 1960
Location: 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool
[A.] Instrumental #1 (7:45)
[B.] Instrumental #2 (11:10)
[C.] Instrumental #3 (aka “Turn the Switches Off”) (4:58)
[D. ]Cayenne (2:27)
[E.] Come On People (aka “That’s an Important Number”) (7:49)
[F.] I Don’t Need No Cigarette Boy (5:56)
[G.] Well Darling (5:03)
[H.] I Don’t Know (5:54)

The so-called Quarry Men rehearsal tapes have a long and confusing history. In late January 1960, John’s art college chum Stuart Sutcliffe was persuaded to buy a bass guitar and join the (now drummerless) group, newly dubbed the Beatals. This reel of extremely rough recordings probably preserves some of the earliest rehearsals with Stu, whose rudimentary bass skills are in evidence throughout.

Stu gave a copy of this reel (A–H) to his fiancée, Astrid Kirchherr, and it remained in her possession until 1994, when she returned it to George. In the late 1970s, German musician Frank Dostal went into Teldec Studio in Hamburg with this Kirchherr tape and the Braun tape (see following entry) and compiled the two onto a third reel, adding a “simulated stereo” effect. It’s most likely via this compilation that the material began to appear on bootlegs in the 1980s.

On November 3, 1994, in an interview with Mark Lewisohn released on the Anthology CD, Paul recalled: “Sometimes I’d borrow a tape recorder, a Grundig with a little green eye, and we’d sort of go ’round to my house and try and record little things . . . but those were very much home demos. Very bad quality. But I think a couple of those still exist.” Coincidentally, that very month back in Liverpool, Reginald Hodgson came across the very Grundig his brother Charles had loaned to Paul in 1960, complete with a reel of tape.

The Hodgson tape is actually a compilation made by Paul back in 1960 as a gesture of thanks; it reportedly includes three songs from the Kirchherr tape (C, D, and G), eleven from the Braun tape (see below), and three songs unavailable elsewhere: “When I’m Sixty-four,” the instrumental “Winston’s Walk,” and a surprisingly early version of “Ask Me Why.” Reginald’s son Peter Hodgson traveled to Sussex on March 27, 1995, to deliver his copy of the tape to Paul, with the result that a 1:13 edit of “Cayenne” appeared on Anthology 1 later that year.

Paul recalled that the songs were probably taped in the bathroom of his home in Allerton during Easter vacation 1960. He also thinks that his brother Mike plays the occasional percussion that can be heard. With Stuart still learning the ropes, no cover versions were attempted, merely rambling twelve-bar instrumentals, often with John and Paul interjecting lyrics off the top of their heads.

“Cayenne” is apparently not improvised, but rather a very early McCartney instrumental composition. “Well Darling,” which has some nice harmonizing from John and Paul, may also be a real attempt at writing a song, although they clearly didn’t sweat over the words (“Meanwhile, what do you think?/I think you stink like a sink”).

As for the instrumentals, they’re not much fun to listen to, compounded by the fact that bootleggers have seen fit for some unfathomable reason to extend nearly all of them by means of editing. The timings above represent the length as heard on bootleg: A should last only 5:33 (the edit is at 5:07); B is really 6:38 (edit is at 5:24); C is actually 3:00 (edit at 2:47). Also note that most of these songs seem to be sped up to run about a half step too high in pitch, although it’s doubtful the Beatals’ guitars were tuned to exact concert pitch.

RELEASE HISTORY
1987: The vinyl bootleg Liverpool, May 1960 included A–C, E, F, and H in fair quality. The same year, D and an incomplete version of G appeared in similar quality on the bootleg LP The Quarrymen at Home.
1995: An incomplete copy of D was released on Anthology 1.
1996: Slight upgrades of A–H appeared from tape source on the bootleg CD Wildcat!
2002: A complete version of G surfaced on the CD-R The Braun-Kirchherr Tapes.
2007: The best-quality tapes of A–H appeared on the CD-R Strong Before Our Birth, speed-corrected and unlooped.

4. Home demo
Date: ca. July 1960
Location: 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool
[A.] Hallelujah I Love Her So (2:34)
[B.] One After 909—take 1 (2:24)
[C.] Movin’ and Groovin’/Ramrod (3:43)
[D.] Instrumental #1 (11:50)
[E.] You’ll Be Mine (1:42)
[F.] unknown/Matchbox (0:58)
[G.] I Will Always Be in Love with You (2:19)
[H.] The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise (2:40)
[I.] That’s When Your Heartaches Begin (1:15)
[J.] Instrumental #2 (17:50)
[K.] Wildcat—take 1 (2:32)
[L.] One After 909—take 2 (1:27)
[M.] Some Days (1:38)
[N.] You Must Write Every Day (2:30)
[O.] I’ll Follow the Sun (1:46)
[P.] Hello Little Girl (1:53)
[Q.] Wildcat—take 2 (1:23)

In May 1960, the newly christened Silver Beetles (John, Paul “Ramon,” “Carl” Harrison, Stuart “DeStael,” and drummer Tommy Moore) went on their first semiprofessional tour, backing singer Johnny Gentle in Scotland and performing an opening set of their own. Back in Liverpool in June, they dropped the “Silver,” becoming the Beatles at last, and lost their drummer.

During this drummerless period, they recorded another batch of songs on the Grundig at Paul’s house. Given the obvious improvement in playing ability, these probably stem from after the tour, and given the louder guitar sound, may have been taped after Paul’s June 30 purchase of a Rosetti Solid 7 electric guitar. A copy of this reel was given to Hamburg pal Hans-Walther “Icke” Braun in the spring of 1961. Braun was filmed playing a portion of “I’ll Follow the Sun” for German TV in 1966, and he contributed his reel to the aforementioned Dostal compilation, but has held on to his original copy. In addition, the Hodgson tape includes A, B, E–I, K, and N–P from this reel (A and E appear on Anthology 1 from this source).

This is generally a much more professional and entertaining group of songs than the Kirchherr tape, although it does have a pair of second-rate instrumentals: D, stretched from 7:15 by bootleggers via an edit at 5:48, and J, which ought to last 10:07 but has an edit at 8:24 extending the length beyond the limits of human tolerance. We do get a glimpse into the Silver Beetles’ stage repertoire via competent covers of Eddie Cochran (A), Duane Eddy (C), Carl Perkins (F), Fats Domino (G), Les Paul/Mary Ford (H), Elvis Presley (I), and Gene Vincent (K).

Most intriguing are another handful of early Lennon/McCartney originals, including two takes of “One after 909,” and quite different arrangements of “I’ll Follow the Sun” and “Hello Little Girl” (both sounding very much like Buddy Holly). “You’ll Be Mine” is an over-the-top parody ballad, while “Some Days” and “You Must Write Every Day” vanished into the mists of time along with other originals from the era such as “Won’t You Please Say Goodbye,” “Too Bad About Sorrows,” “Keep Looking That Way,” “Thinking of Linking,” “I Fancy Me Chances,” “Years Roll Along,” “Wake Up in the Morning,” “Just Fun,” “If Tomorrow Ever Comes,” and “Looking Glass.”

With the August addition of drummer Pete Best, the Beatles showed enough promise to take up residency in Hamburg, West Germany, maching shau for upward of six hours a night until deportations and other intrigues forced them to return home to Liverpool in December.

RELEASE HISTORY
1967: An excerpt of O, played directly from Hans-Walther Braun’s tape, was aired January 6 on the German TV special Damals In Hamburg, which circulates on video.
1987: The vinyl bootleg Liverpool, May 1960 included A–D, J, O, and Q in fair quality. The same year E–G, I, K–N, and P appeared in similar quality on the bootleg LP The Quarrymen at Home.