Trying to see the Beatles through the tourists: Liverpool

On Tuesday my alarm went off at 5:47am. It was painful. Why were Kim and I getting up so early? Because we were promised a cold breakfast before we got on the bus for Liverpool. As I am sure everyone reading this blog knows, Liverpool is the city from whence came Ringo, John, Paul, and George. Thusly, our professor thought it would make a good two day field trip. (When is the last time you went on a two day field trip?) Our official field trip work in Liverpool was a walk through the Beatles Story Museum, which is exactly what it sounds like, and a ticket to ride on the Magical Mystery Tour, which is a bus ride past various Beatles locations. My unofficial field trip experience in Liverpool was going to the Cavern Club.

Initially I didn't think I was going to get much out of the Beatles Story Museum. It began with a description of the early Quarrymen and how John Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church festival, a story I have heard multiple times through Beatles Class course work. I was worried that this would just be a rehash of the Beatles biography we read. I continued on through the Hamburg display, listening to the audio guide, hoping to get something new about the Beatles out of the experience.

Then I walked into a room that was designed to look like the office of the Mersey Beat. For those of you stay-at-homes, Mersey Beat was a music newspaper created by Bill Harry, one of John Lennon's friends. I knew about Mersey Beat already. What I didn't realize is that Mersey Beat was actually like a newspaper. I was under the impression that Mersey Beat was similar to Owl in the Hollow, the student newspaper I reported for last year. It wasn't. Mersey Beat was still small, but Bill Harry actually rented an office for the paper (a tiny attic office, but an office none the less) and many many hours of work were put into writing the Beat. Through the audio guide, I heard Bill Harry himself talking about why he started a Liverpool music newspaper. He said that he wrote to the newspapers telling them that they needed to cover the Liverpool music scene. Bill Harry said that Liverpool was to rock and roll what New Orleans was to Jazz, but the newspapers wouldn't listen, so he started his own paper. Now I understand what it was to have the Mersey Beat covering the Beatles constantly; this wasn't a couples of pages of writing hardly that nobody read. Everyone in Liverpool who were involved with rock and roll were reading about the Beatles.

The other thing I learned a lot about at the Beatles Story Museum was the Cavern Club. The Cavern Club was the rock and roll venue in Liverpool during the early days of the Beatles. For some reason I was under the impression of a big empty room with a high ceiling. This was very wrong. We got to visit the reconstruction of the original Cavern Club on Tuesday night. The door is on street level, but to enter you have to walk down the stairs. The first time I went in the cavern club it felt like the steps were endless and I was descending deep into the earth. When I reached the bottom of the steps I was in a fairly smallish room. The walls and ceiling are all made of bricks. The ceiling is low and curved into the walls and pillars break up the room. The stage is small, with a colorful brick pattern painted on the wall behind it. Music is performed very loudly. It struck me that a more apt name might have been The Cave. To me the word "Cavern" suggest a huge underground space. While the Club was certainly underground it was by no means huge.

In the Beatles Story Museum I got to hear first hand stories of what it was like to go to the Cavern Club. It was not an alcohol serving establishment; the Cavern Club was truly a place for teenagers to go to experience music. That experience was getting squashed against the bodies of other teenagers, being enveloped by their body heat, and soaked in the odor of the Cavern Club. It smelled like sweat, disinfectant, smoke, and the hotdogs that were sold instead of beer. Out of this emerged the Beatles. They were teenagers when teenage girls started yelling at their concerts, but at that point in time the girls were their peers, and the girls were yelling for the other Liverpool bands.

After Paul was invited into John's band, the Quarrymen, Paul invited George into the band. This is basic Beatles knowledge that I've learned at least three times now, but the Beatles Story Museum gave the story more depth by describing to me how George and Paul met on the bus on the way to school. One of them was carrying a guitar, which must have caused the other to start a conversation about their commonly held instrument. (Later the magical mystery tour took us past George and Paul's bus stop, which is next to the barber shop and bank that Paul wrote about in Penny Lane.) I had heard numerous times before that John initially didn't want George in the band because he was three years younger. But three years younger seemed awfully abstract until I learned that John was seventeen at the time and George was only fourteen. As someone who has just recently been seventeen, I can tell you that fourteen does indeed seem a whole lot younger.

This class has taught me more about the Beatles then I ever thought there was to know, so I came to Liverpool knowing a good deal about them. But I left Liverpool with many more rich details about the band, and I feel as if I've got the third dimension of their lives as Liverpudlians and musicians. The whole time we were in Liverpool, even when we we're doing strictly Beatle-related activities, I was thinking that this was their city. Paul might have walked these streets and John got married behind that door (just a few steps from our hostel). Ringo went to the Lime Street train station that I am now quite familiar with, and George probably laughed at the statue of the naked man. But Liverpool has changed so much since they were lads there. For one thing, Liverpool is now the city the Beatles are from. Go into any gift shop in Liverpool, even the one in the Anglican cathedral, and Beatles merchandise can be purchased. What was the McCartney, Harrison, Lennon, and Starkey Liverpool really like?

I wonder.