The most famous club in the world started out as a mere imitation of another venue. When jazz enthusiast Alan Sytner returned home to Liverpool from Paris’s jazz district, he wanted to recapture the feel of the City of Light’s Le Caveau club. After a bit of searching – and excavating – he managed to find the perfect spot, an old air raid shelter on Mathew Street, in an area largely known for its wholesale produce markets. On this date in 1957, he opened his own Le Caveau, The Cavern Club.
The Cavern opened to the stylings of the Merseysippi Jazz Band, a veteran Liverpool ensemble who favored the music of Louis Armstrong. The club was popular with the local jazz scene, which took delight in the seedy ambience of the barrel-vaulted ceiling and the low lighting. Over the course of the next three years, most of the big names in British jazz played at the Cavern.
In addition to the more traditional forms of jazz, a slightly bastardized form also crept in the door. Skiffle was a hybrid of jazz, blues, folk and country music, played largely on homemade instruments. For kids in post-war England, it was an easy musical form to latch onto. After Lonnie Donegan took the nation by storm in 1956 with “Rock Island Line,” kids everywhere were forming their own skiffle bands. The Cavern gave a handful of these bands a stage. Among them was a group called The Quarrymen, fronted by a young John Lennon.
Lennon and his pals played the Cavern for the first time on August 7, 1957. Ever the rebel, the 16-year-old Lennon led his band into Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” which earned him a stern, hasty note from the management reminding him that rock and roll was strictly verboten at the venue. Nevertheless, the band were invited back a few months later, this time with Paul McCartney in tow.
But the rock and roll ban remained strongly enforced throughout Sytner’s ownership of the club, which ended in 1959, when he sold the Cavern to Ray McFall. McFall was in no hurry to change the format, and resisted the ever-pressing urge to play rock and roll (he also banned blue jeans!). But eventually, even McFall could see the writing on the wall, and so on May 25, 1960, the Cavern had its first Beat Night. The featured artists were Cass and the Cassanovas (later The Big Three) and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, featuring a certain Ringo Starr on drums. The night was a massive success and rock secured a foothold in the club, which only grew stronger as jazz audiences waned.
McFall brought in local compere, Bob Woller, to host Beat Nights and later, the popular lunchtime sessions. It was at one of these lunchtime sessions (on February 9, 1961), when a local band returned from an extended stay in Germany and set the house on fire. Hardened by the raucous Hamburg crowds and grueling eight-hour sets, The Beatles hit the Cavern stage like a lightning bolt. Their driving beats and howling good vocals immediately vaulted them to the top of the pack. Over the next two years, they would only get better, striving to outpace the likes of Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Big Three, The Remo Four, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, and the Searchers.
Eventually, word of this group that had kids queuing on their lunch hours just to hear this local band tear up “Long Tall Sally,” “Matchbox,” “Slow Down” and other rock classics spread to a local businessman named Brian Epstein. After a teen stopped by his NEMS music store requesting a copy of Tony Sheridan’s “My Bonnie,” recorded with The Beatles in Hamburg, Epstein was curious enough to check out the band for himself on his lunch hour on November 9, 1962. Epstein was floored by the leather-clad rockers and offered to become their manager. The rest, as they say, is history.
But the Cavern continued on as an important venue, though its star faded a bit as beat music fell out of style. Eventually, the club was forced to close, as economic issues (including safety renovations) became too much for Cavern management. The last band to take its stage was the Dutch group, Focus, in May 1973.
Unbelievably, this landmark in modern music was knocked down at the behest of a shortsighted city council that didn’t see its potential as a tourist destination, instead choosing to create a shaft for an underground rail loop that, ironically, would never be built.
But this story has a happy ending. In 1984, former footballer Tommy Smith joined a group of investors to help rebuild the club, adhering closely to the club’s original design and with many of the same bricks. It hit a few bumps in the road during its renaissance, but now stands as the cultural centerpiece of the city of Liverpool, with millions of fans from all over the world walking down those steps to soak in the atmosphere that gave birth to some of rock’s greatest legends.
(gibson)
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