Art School Dances: 1960
With help of Bill Harry, friend of John and Stu who was a fellow student at the Liverpool College of Art and who would soon begin to publish Merseybeat, the newspaper that was quite helpful to our boys, The Beatles were commissioned to play monthly Saturday night college dances. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a very complete record of how many of these shows they played or even when they started doing it. One thing is for sure, they were playing without a drummer. It was simply John, Paul, George, and Stu.
When they didn’t really have any shows to play, it didn’t matter a whole lot. But with four of them playing these shows it did start mattering that they only had one amplifier, Paul’s little green Elpico AC-55, which only had two inputs. Fortunately, both Bill Harry and Stu were on the committee of the Student Union of the Liverpool College of Art, known as Sulca. And so Sulca bought an amplifier (and possibly a PA system for vocals, but that’s less clear) that the “college band” could use. Our boys were the only “college band,” so they were the only ones who would use the new amplifier.
Typically, the Student Union was filled with jazz. John used to complain about how hard it was to get rock and roll played even on the gramophone. So, it was gratifying to be able to “get the snobs,” as he put it, by playing at these dances. But importantly, it gave Stu a chance to see what it was like to play in front of an audience. He had been playing for such a short time that he was certainly not performing at a professional level yet, but this was an opportunity to play in front of his fellow students, and he was well liked, so the pressure was low.
Amplifiers
So, about that Sulca-owned amplifier. Well, let’s back up a bit. As stated above, we know that Paul had his Elpico. He had owned it since early to mid-1958 (and apparently he still has it!). When The Quarrymen were playing at the Casbah Coffee Club in 1959 and early 1960, they had a second amplifier courtesy of fourth guitarist Ken Brown. According to Brown, that amp was a Watkins Westminster, and it, of course, went away when Ken Brown stopped playing with them. The amplifier that was bought by Sulca for the Student Union dances was apparently also a Watkins Westminster. It would make sense since John had a hand in recommending which amp to get and the Watkins would have been one that he was comfortable with.
This all brings up a bothersome question to me that I can’t really get an answer to. Various sources talk about how the Sulca-owned Watkins was only used by our boys. But I have yet to find a source that suggests whether the amp was left at the Student Union at this point or if the boys (at least sometimes) took it with them. The reason that it bothers me is the Forthlin Road recordings that took place in the first half of 1960. On those recordings, it definitely sounds like all three guitars are amplified. John would have been playing his Hofner Club 40, Paul, his Zenith (unless he borrowed one of George’s guitars), and Stu, his Hofner 500/5 bass guitar. The problem? Paul’s Elpico only had two inputs. Did I mention that?
So, is it possible that one of the guitars was not amplified? Well, yes, it’s possible. If so, it must have been Paul’s Zenith, which was an acoustic guitar. An electric guitar or electric bass, without being “plugged in,” would never have been loud enough for the recording. Or there are a couple of other possibilities. One is that they plugged one of the guitars into a radio. In fact, I heard on a visit to Forthlin Road a few years ago the story that they sometimes did exactly that. It is also theoretically possible that they had brought the Sulca amplifier to Paul’s house, effectively treating the amplifier as if it were their own. And so what ever happened to that amp? Well, if you take a look at famous (and easily found) photos from the Indra in Hamburg, pay special attention to the amplifier right behind Stu. It happens to be a Watkins Westminster.
The boys would soon buy another amplifier, a Selmer Truvoice Stadium TV19T. They would take that and Paul’s Elpico to Hamburg in August. But as you can see in photos, there’s the Watkins. In Andy Babiuk’s amazing Beatles Gear, it is suggested that the Watkins belonged to Pete Best. Is that possible? Sure. I have seen it argued (by fans) that the Watkins was owned by The Casbah, who let bands use it, but that seems to be a conflation with the fact that The Quarrymen had used Ken Brown’s amplifier when they were playing there. June Harry, Bill’s cousin and a member of the Sulca committee, had a different story in an interview with Mark Lewisohn.
According to June Harry, in the days leading up to when The Beatles were to leave for Hamburg, in August of 1960, John begged her to give him the key to the Student Union cupboard in which the Watkins was kept. He promised her that he would have the amplifier back before anyone knew it was gone. So how’s that for a strong suggestion of where that amplifier in the photo actually came from. As for the story of whatever happened to that Watkins Westminster amplifier, that will come another day, when we start talking about The Beatles in Hamburg.
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Next week the subject will be more about John’s first guitar. Stay tuned. Looking forward to that!
- Adamson
Photo: Liverpool College of Art; Andrew Martin Adamson, 25th of June, 2017.
This is good stuff. Thanks.