During the time I spent there researching Shout I developed a love of Liverpool that would never leave me.
I loved the grandeur of its Victorian commercial buildings and the Pier Head, a promenade rather than a pier, with the headquarters of the Cunard line, the Docks and Harbour Board and the Royal Liver Insurance Company, the so-called ‘Three Graces’, in a towering row like an off-cut from the Manhattan skyline 3000 miles across the Atlantic.
Always I kept an ear cocked for the scabrous Scouse wit with its flights of surrealism that so often found their way into John’s lyrics. In Liverpool, someone of puny physique is said to be ‘built like a racing tadpole’ and someone unhandy or accident-prone to be ‘as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.’
I’d invariably stay at the Adelphi Hotel in Ranelagh Place, whose many-sided grey bulk is not 100 yards from Lime Street station. Known as ‘The Liner That Never Sails’, it was built at the apogee of deluxe transatlantic crossings and designed to acclimatise homecoming passengers to dry land again and prepare departing ones for their five pampered days at sea.
The hotel’s bedroom doors opened outwards as on board ship, its single beds resembled bunks and the blankets bore the crest of its original owner, the steam-powered London-Midland-Scottish Railway.
One suite - where the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein had allegedly spent the night with Little Richard - was a delicate riot of Chinoiserie, another had brown suede walls and Art Deco armchairs, even a little brown suede-covered clock on the mantelpiece.
There was a Turkish bath in the basement and an immense Palm Court modelled on the one that went down with the Titanic. Often I’d be alone there, writing up my notes over afternoon tea with sandwiches, scones and ‘fancy’ cakes, as they used to be called, arranged in tiers on a silver stand.
I had expected my main source of Beatle intelligence in their home city to be Allan Williams, but Williams was a shambolic character whose anecdotes as the self-confessed ‘Man Who Gave The Beatles Away’ had worn smooth with repetition and retrospective embellishments.
Instead, it was Bob Wooler, the former Cavern club deejay, who pointed the way to the best material in Shout’s Liverpool chapters.
Wooler had done more for the embryo Beatles than anyone except Brian Epstein yet had nothing to show for it, not even a home of his own.
Already in his mid 30s when the Beatles were in their early 20s, he was rotund and dignified, with an addiction to puns and wordplay usually deployed in missives called ‘Woolertins.’
When the Beatles were broke, yet without a day job between them, Wooler dubbed them the world’s first ‘rock ‘n’ dole group’. Brian Epstein he nicknamed ‘The Nemperor’, a play on the name of Epstein’s management company, Nems Enterprises, and burgeoning ‘empire’ of Liverpudlian musical talent.
Presiding over the Cavern’s lunchtime, nighttime and sometimes all-night sessions, Wooler modelled himself on Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed, the American deejay who claimed credit for inventing the term ‘rock ‘n’ roll’, traditionally two separate R&B euphemisms for sex.
His catchphrase ‘Hi all you Cavern-dwellers, welcome to the best of cellars’ was a double pun on ‘bestsellers’ and comedian Peter Sellers’s album The Best of Sellers that few of his teenage listeners ever understood.
In the Beatles’ early days, their stage act included few Lennon-McCartney songs, although dozens already existed. They were primarily a ‘covers band’, drawing on the same R&B standards and current chart hits as dozens of others.
Wooler gave them an edge by lending them American imports from his private record-collection like Chan Romero’s Hippy Hippy Shake (later a hit for their Cavern rivals, the Swinging Blue Jeans) and encouraging them to perform numbers by African American female groups like the Shirelles’ Boys and the Cookies’ Chains.
He also gave them tips on presentation and showmanship, to which they’d never before paid the slightest attention. Before they came onstage, he advised, they should build up audience expectation by having the PA system play a record of ‘The William Tell Overture’. Then as the curtains parted, they should already be blasting out their opening number.
So valued an adviser did he become that at their first meeting with Brian Epstein to discuss a possible management deal, he was the only outsider present.
If he’d had an education as good as John’s or Paul’s, he might have been a journalist or teacher but instead he’d left school at 15 to become a clerk at British Railways’ Garston depot, a soulless job he detested. Emceeing at dance-halls, then the Cavern had been the only outlet for his creativity.
When I met him, he was linked – or, it often appeared, shackled - to Allan Williams in a company named WW Promotions which staged low-level pop nostalgia events often ending in chaos due to the partners’ shared weakness for what Wooler ruefully termed ‘the sauce.’
It had ruined his one chance to go national as a deejay in the Beatles’ wake. When the BBC’s Radio 1 pop station started in 1967, he’d been offered an audition, but been so overcome with nerves that he got drunk beforehand and completely blew it.
The rapport we developed had only partly to do with the Beatles, for I shared his addiction to puns and admiration for Lorenz Hart of the 1930s songwriting partnership Rodgers and Hart, whose lyrics for My Funny Valentine and There’s A Small Hotel, we agreed, represented the summit of the craft.
Wooler tracked down several crucial figures from the Beatles’ early days on Shout’s behalf, including two whose trails seemed to have gone cold. The first was Tommy Moore, the rather elderly drummer they took with them to Scotland on their first ever tour, whose bass drum was so insecurely moored, it used to roll away across the stage mid-performance.
The second was Raymond Jones, who’d walked into NEMS’s record department on October 28 1961 and requested a single named My Bonnie that the Beatles had made pseudonymously in Hamburg, so launching Brian Epstein on his journey of miraculous discovery.
It’s since been claimed that Jones was a fiction invented for Epstein’s 1964 autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise, but thanks to Bob Wooler I know he was real because I spoke to him.
Epstein’s seemingly infallible touch with other young Liverpool acts after the Beatles – Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas – made him see himself as a pop music version of Sergei Diaghilev whose Ballet Russes company in the early 1900s moulded megastars like Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova.
But, as Bob Wooler told me, that magic touch hadn’t always worked.
Epstein could do nothing, for instance, with Rory Storm and his band, the Hurricanes, with whom Ringo Starr had been drummer prior to joining the Beatles.
The flaxen-haired Rory combined exuberant showmanship with daring athleticism, often shinning up the wall behind the stage on which he was performing without fluffing a word of his vocal.
If the venue was an indoor swimming-pool, as it so often was, he’d dive from the topmost board in a pair of gold lamé briefs, then swim to where a microphone waited for him to finish Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.
Yet under Epstein’s aegis, his debut single was a wan cover version of America, from West Side Story which, in contrast to his aquatic feats, sank without trace.
Similarly, the Big Three, a hard-rock trio prefiguring Cream, had to record a prissy little ballad called I’m With You that came nowhere near the charts.
‘They were all so enraged, they were threatening to fill Brian in,’ Wooler recalled.
As we became friendlier, he sometimes referred cryptically to his ‘Teddy Kennedy moment’ – a reference to the disgrace of JFK’s youngest brother who left a young woman to drown when he accidentally drove his car into the sea off Chappaquiddick island in Massachusetts.
Wooler had suffered no disgrace but, in his own eyes, something infinitely worse. It had happened in 1963 when John left his wife, Cynthia, and newborn son, Julian to go to Spain on holiday à deux with Brian Epstein.
Towards the end of his life, John would admit that he and Epstein had two sexual encounters, ‘the first time for me to see what it was like, the second to make sure I didn’t like it.’ In 1963, however, it had been no joking matter.
Straight after the trip Paul turned 21 and at the huge Liverpool knees-up that celebrated it, John clean forgot they’d ever written a song called I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party. Wooler was naturally among the guests and, after one too many libations, playfully alluded to what he called John’s Spanish ‘honeymoon’ with Epstein, At this John flew into a rage and publicly beat him up.
With so many witnesses, there was no hope of keeping the ugly incident secret from Fleet Street. Instead, the Beatles’ press officer Tony Barrow managed to salvage their image as adorable mop-tops with an adroit bit of news-management.
Barrow planted a pre-emptive story in the Sunday Mirror in which John supposedly apologised to ‘my old pal Bob’ for losing his temper while he was ‘high’ – in those days meaning drunk. Wooler, who’d suffered a black eye and several bruised ribs, accepted an out-of-court settlement of £200 for the assault but always remained haunted by it.
Sixteen years on, he was a lonely figure without a wife, girlfriend or boyfriend or any known domicile. I talked to him a couple of times at WW Productions’ bare and noticeably un-busy office in Tithebarn (known locally as Tittybarn) Street. ‘Oh … marvellous!’ he said whenever I appeared.
But mostly we met at the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, not a restaurant but a pub whose sumptuous woodwork and labyrinthine mirrors were installed by the same shipwrights who fitted out the great Cunard liners. The gents’ toilet had stalls made of rose-coloured marble and when the coast was clear parties of women would be taken in to view them.
Even my other main Liverpool-based informant Joe Flannery, who’d known Wooler for years, had no idea where he went at night after the pubs closed. ‘I asked him point-blank once “Bob, where exactly do you live?” Flannery told me, “but he pretended not to hear.”
I found out accidentally early one morning before catching my train back to London, when I called at the WW office to drop in a collection of Lorenz Hart’s lyrics I’d found in a secondhand book shop and knew Wooler would devour.
The door of the office was locked but it wasn’t empty. Through its old fashioned open fanlight came the sound of someone turning over in a makeshift bed with a despairing groan.
I couldn’t risk embarrassing him even though he probably would still have said ‘Oh… marvellous!’
The door had no letterbox so I had to leave Hart’s collected lyrics on the floor. Inevitably I thought of There’s A Small Hotel and the couplet Wooler always singled out for its haiku perfection: “When the steeple bell / Says ‘goodnight, sleep well…’
So very far it seemed from a camp bed in a bleak office in Tittybarn Street, Liverpool. Then I tiptoed away desperately sad, as I am now to recall it.
I will look forward to your Brian Epstein biography. Enjoyed this piece!
As a Cavern member all those years ago, Bob Wooler was a shadowy figure very rarely making an appearance. I would have been more likely to recognise his voice. It was a wonderful era to be a teenager with live music all evening (until 11.30 when the Cavern closed ) Records merely filled in the gaps between bands! No alcohol and no fights!