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the band made on his childhood and musical upbringing.
“My whole life I’ve really been into the groups that came out of
Liverpool and the history they created,” he says. “It was a real music
revolution; it changed everything. It’s a little bit intimidating because I
remember being a kid listening to the records, staring at the album covers,
watching the films, and I never thought in a million years that, in a
very
small way, I would be following in their footsteps.”
The band left the hotel in the morning with a full program for the day,
including a 10-song concert that night at the Cavern Club, in downtown
Liverpool. During a breakfast at Puccino’s, on Liverpool’s famous
Mathew Street, just hours before the Heavies would play their first live
performance, I asked Mike what he expected from the trip. He said he saw
this as “an expansion of personal horizons.”
The Beatles’ First Manager
It was through their Liverpool connections that they arranged for the
band to have a sit-down interview at the Jacaranda with
Allan Williams
.
Williams, the first manager of the Beatles is more notoriously remembered
as “the man who gave the Beatles away.” In the early ’60s, Williams owned
the Jacaranda with Beryl Williams, where the five founding members of
the Beatles – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best
and Stuart Sutcliffe (Best quit the Beatles in 1962, or as some would say,
‘Pete was sacked to make room for Ringo,’ Sutcliffe died in ’62) – played
some of their earliest shows. As the Beatles’ booking agent, he was the first
to bring them to Hamburg, where they gained exposure – and experience
– at Bruno Koschmider’s club, Kaiserkeller.
At 78, Williams is stoop-shouldered and platinum-haired, with a drawn,
wistful face. He lectures frequently about his days with the Beatles, often
with a glass of red wine on the rocks in his hand, and today he speaks
about the Beatles with more sentimentality than he did in 1962, when he
sourly advised Brian Epstein not to touch them “with a barge pole.”
“I always get nostalgic when I come here,” Williams said to me about
the Jacaranda. “Next door was a candy shop, until five or six years ago.”
We were sitting in the basement of the bar in what was once a brick-
lined furnace that is now occupied by a long wooden table and bench.
The Welshman told us he hadn’t been impressed early on with the Beatles,
circa 1959, when they were “coffee-bar layabouts” who ditched art classes
to watch rock shows. It was their personalities that attracted him. “Most
of the groups around were as thick as pig shit,” he said. “The Beatles were
different. They were intelligent clowns. I mean they decorated my toilets
for me.”
On the subject of Beatles contemporaries, Williams can be quick with
the invective or downright mean, but he’s proud of the good relationship
he kept with Brian Epstein and Epstein’s mother, Queenie.
“I know he was the best thing that ever happened to the Beatles,” he
says of Epstein.
To a certain degree, Williams knows that giving the Beatles to Epstein
“The Ride” joins John Lennon’s sister, Julia Baird (second from left) after an
extended sit-down with her in Liverpool