Stuart Sutcliffe joins - January 1960
From BeatlesWiki
| Event | |
| Date | January 1960 |
| Short description | Stuart Sutcliffe joins. |
| Location | |
Sometime in this month, Stuart Sutcliffe joined Johnny and The Moondogs, as they were then called. They had persuaded John's art college friends Bill Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe to buy a tape recorder, for use by all students. Very quickly, The Beatles stole the tape recorder for their use only. John had then persuaded Stuart to join the group. He sold a painting for sixty-five quid (a large amount of money back then), so John convinced him to buy a bass. He never learned to play it properly. Paul later recalled, "We talked him into it – over a cappuccino at The Casbah. I remember we were sitting around a table – me, John, Stu, maybe George – and we persuaded him to do it. None of us wanted to be the bass player. It wasn’t the number one job. We all wanted to be up front. In our minds it was the fat guy in the group who nearly always played the bass, and he always stood at the back. But we wanted to be up front singing, looking good, to pull the birds. George remembered: He had no idea how to play it. We all showed him what we could, but he really picked it up just by coming round with us and playing on stage. It dwarfed him a bit, he was a smallish guy. But it looked kind of heroic, he stood a certain way, he had shades, he looked the part… but he wasn’t that good a player. And that was the problem with me and Stu. There were two reasons really: one, I was very ambitious for the group, and I didn’t actually like anything that might hold us back. Cos there’s enough stuff holding you back anyway, without someone in the group who’s not that good. Any of our mates could look at the group and spot it, and of the good groups around – Kingsize Taylor & The Dominoes, The Big Three, Faron’s Flamingos – any of those guys would just spot it: bass player’s not much. You knew that, there was no kidding people from Liverpool, or kids of that age, they don’t mess around. It was just: lousy bass player, man." He would stay their bass player until mid-1961, when he stayed in Hamburg with his girlfriend Astrid Kircherr instead of going home with The Beatles. Sutcliffe didn't take his role in the band as seriously as the others did. He wanted to be a painter and was not as interested as the others were because of that. The only heard-by-the-public recordings he's appeared on ae the 1960 rehearsals at Paul's house. He also appears on a tape recorded at The Jacaranda Club in June of that year, but it has not been heard by the public and it is of extremely poor quality.
