Rock the Casbah
By Des Burkinshaw
Just before we started recording the first podcasts, Mark and I made a trip to Liverpool to visit the true birthplace of The Beatles, The Casbah Club.
I’ve been to many venues associated with The Beatles – from Abbey Road to the Indra in Hamburg. The Casbah is unique, the only one truly preserved in aspic. You can still see and touch the low ceilings painted by John, Paul and George as they prepared the basement of Mona Best’s house for its opening (that’s Mark in the picture, standing beneath John’s Aztec ceiling). John also carved his name into the wall and ceiling, both marks as clear as the days he carved them in 1961/62.
The only thing even close to the Casbah’s authenticity, are the walls of Abbey Road Studio 2, which look identical to the many shots taken there in the 60s. The famous sound-diffusing curtains which hang from ceiling-to-floor have never been cleaned for fear of changing the sound of the room. Truly, molecules of that 60s magic still permeate the fabric. The curtains are nicotine-stained and, if you give them a whiff, stink of almost a century of being left alone. I imagine the average micro-biologist could make a lifetime’s study from them.
As soon as Pete Best was kicked out of The Beatles, Mona closed the Casbah, and the family continued living upstairs. The basement was left untouched, but you can now visit it and get a guided tour from Pete’s nephew. True, it’s in West Derby, a 15-minute car journey from the city centre, but every time I’ve visited, I’m struck by how few visitors it has. Most Beatle fans visiting Liverpool are content to visit the re-creation of the Cavern Club in Mathew Street. There’s nothing wrong with the Cavern, and it’s only over the road from the demolished original, but of course it’s not the real thing. The Casbah absolutely is.
And most importantly, visiting again made me think about Pete Best and his ignominious ejection from The Beatles on the eve of their success.
I play instruments myself and, when I was young, dreamt of being in a band. As soon as I got in one, I found it incredibly frustrating. I also write and, Paul McCartney-style, like everyone to play just like I like it. That’s a problem in pop/rock because a) it’s not as if I’ve got God-given arranging talents, but b) pop/rock musicians, unlike classical musicians, don’t read their parts, they create them. Think of Mathew Fisher’s organ part in Whiter Shade of Pale. The arrangement often IS the song.
Added to this, I was 18-20. I don’t know about you, but my people-managing skills were not up to much by that age. Gradually, I gave up on bands and just enjoyed making music by myself, for myself.
The circumstances around Pet Best’s sacking are always being debated, but it seems fairly clear they hadn’t been happy with him for some time. When George Martin criticised his drumming, just as Bert Kaempfert had in Hamburg, his time was up. By then, they also already knew they sounded better with Ringo, who had depped for Pete a few times.
The thing that has always intrigued people is that not one of Paul, John, or George, spoke to Pete about it directly. Leave it to your manager to sack your bandmate of two years. Typical male teen behaviour if you ask me.
But callow youth doesn’t explain why, by the time of the Get Back sessions in 1969, John and Paul were still so oblivious to the damage they were inflicting on George – then, and over the years.
I was recently reading a research paper about Educational and Child Psychology and came across a strategy outlined in a paper by Hawkins and Shohet: Using Psychodynamic Thinking.
The idea is, every member of a team has to answer a set of questions as a way of exploring the group dynamic.
I couldn’t help but think of those Get Back sessions and wondered what would have happened if someone had persuaded the four Beatles to each answer Hawkins and Shohet’s five statements:
1. The unwritten rules of this group are…
2. What I think we are avoiding talking about…
3. What I find hard to admit about my work…
4. What I hold back on saying about other people here is…
5. The hidden agendas that this group carries are….
I don’t think, and neither of the paper’s authors thought, answering these questions was likely to solve a group dynamic problem in and of itself, but it would put teams on the path to self-knowledge.
Untreated group dynamic problems will break up a team eventually. Maybe, if it’s an office-based team whose individuals are easily replaced, this is an inefficient but bearable problem. If it’s a creative team like a band, a break-up is potentially more catastrophic to the abilities of its individual members.
For example, another famous music team that broke-up through group dynamic issues, is 10cc. After the fourth 10cc album, How Dare You, Lol Crème and Kevin Godley left to make the Consequences album and spent time developing their guitar attachment, the Gizmo. This left Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman to keep the 10cc name.
Both teams went on to further successes, but the original hyper-creative dynamic was lost for good. Why? Because Lol and Kev were the crazy, experimental ones, Eric and Graham were the brilliant commercial minds. Together they could encourage the other team to be more like them, apart Lol and Kev were often just weird, and Eric and Graham were often too straight to compete with the band’s unequalled creativity in perfect pop song form.
Eric Stewart told me for his podcast (coming next year) it was obviously a big mistake – why on earth didn’t we just all give each other space to do solo stuff but keep 10cc together? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, right?
As late as 1969 during press interviews for Abbey Road, George Harrison was saying the same thing about The Beatles. I’m paraphrasing, but I think he said it would be selfish for them not to come together occasionally to make records, while they each pursued solo careers. I wonder, as their careers hit their respective doldrums, how often the individual Beatles wished privately they had the others to bounce off?
As (surprisingly) emotionally literate as The Beatles appear in Peter Jackson’s Get Back film, they were ignorant of any strategies that might have helped them sort out those group dynamic problems. Just as, all those years ago, I was completely incapable of sorting out the dynamics in my groups.
Going back further, they were certainly incapable of dealing with the Pete Best issue.
Just for a laugh, if you know your Beatles, take a look at Hawkins and Shohet’s list again, and see if you can fill in the blanks for each Beatle circa 1969. You won’t get very far before wincing.