Years before the underground Liverpudlian club would become synonymous with the Beatles, the Quarrymen made their Cavern Club debut on August 7, 1957. Led by John Lennon (Paul McCartney was away at scout camp), the skiffle group that laid the groundwork for the future Fab Four played the club only months after it opened on January 16 of that year.
Did the venue owner love it? No. Was it a monumental moment in musical history? Most definitely.
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The Quarrymen Make Their Cavern Club Debut
John Lennon first formed the Quarrymen in 1956 with his childhood friend, Pete Shotton. Paul McCartney joined the band a year later, in the summer of 1957, and George Harrison joined the following year. After months of playing school dances and parties, the Quarrymen landed a gig at a real live venue: the Cavern Club.
“We did some skiffle numbers to start off with at the Cavern, but we also did rock ‘n’ roll,” Colin Hanton, Quarrymen drummer, later said of the band’s Cavern debut (via Far Out Magazine). In a fitting foreshadowing of American rock’s influence on Lennon’s future works, the band included hit tracks from across the pond like “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes.”
However, while the band’s frontman might have been happy to include these rock standards, the club owner did not share the same feelings. “John Lennon was passed a note, and he said to the audience, ‘We’ve had a request.’ He opened it up, and it was [club owner] Alan Sytner saying, ‘Cut out the bloody rock ‘n’ roll.’”
The Unlikely Way The Quarrymen Landed Their Gig
Rock ‘n’ roll might have already taken the United States by storm by 1957, but Cavern Club owner Alan Sytner wasn’t interested in promoting this brash genre in his venue. Instead, Sytner wanted to embody the intimate, underground venues of Parisian jazz clubs like Le Caveau de la Huchette. He hired the Merseysippi Jazz Band to perform on the club’s opening night.
Luckily for the Quarrymen, their primary genre, skiffle, lived somewhere between true jazz and true rock. Sytner later recalled in Spencer Leigh’s The Cavern, “Skiffle was a breeding ground for musicians. One or two of them became jazz musicians, but more ended up doing rock ‘n’ roll. I knew John Lennon quite well as we lived in the same area. He lived 400 yards up the road from me. He was 16 and arrogant and hadn’t got a clue, but that was John Lennon” (via Far Out).
The Quarrymen managed to land their gig after a fateful round of golf between Sytner’s father, Dr. Joseph Sytner, and Nigel Walley, a young golf prodigy who also happened to be the bassist and manager of the Quarrymen. After Dr. Sytner informed Walley of his son’s latest club, the bassist slash manager booked a gig at the golf club, hoping that Alan would attend. He did, and just as Walley had hoped, the Cavern Club booked his band.
While some skiffle scholars argue that the Quarrymen’s debut didn’t actually happen on August 7, the Cavern Club’s impact on the young musicians is undeniable. The Quarrymen—and, later, the Beatles—would perform at the club hundreds of times until their international stardom led them up the stairs from the dark, dank club and onto bigger and better venues.
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