Sunday, May 22nd—Liverpool
gravestone w/ Eleanore Rigby's name (look near the middle)
Went to church at St. Peter’s in Woolton (on the outskirts of Liverpool).In Beatle-lore,
this is the place, at a church fete’ (seems sort of like an annual village festival) that
John met Paul –John’s band The Quarrymen were performing at the dance in the church hall.
We found Eleanor Rigby’s grave in the churchyard (Paul claims that he didn’t conciously use it).
We were a bit early, and somehow it was found out we were musicians from California,and suddenly an older man was getting out his keys and telling us he had someplace we had to see. He took us across the street to the church multi-purpose room, took us inside and proceeded to give us a private tour. [This was the first of what we in the band were calling "Margaret moments" after a lady (Margaret) who saw us taking pictures in front of Ringo's house on our 2007 trip to Liverpool, and asked us if we might like to come inside----no planned or payed for tour---but a bootlegged-in affair just done for niceness. These things happened in such a serindipitous way ["If we'd been 5 minutes later or earlier...."] that it did feel like there was Someone up there dropping these opportunities into our laps.]
Turns out, this guy was there at that pivotal moment in Rock n’ Roll history. “I was 15 at the time”. He pointed out a painting done to represent that moment. “It’s not very accurate…but it’s pretty.”
Then it was back to the Cavern for our first show. This one was to be on the traditional ‘front’ stage. The one you see in the photos…looks sort of like a wine cellar with the arches, etc. The show went fine. I’d been drinking tea and water and cough syrup. There was a nice full crowd. Folks were receptive. There was an older, drunken eccentric wearing a jagerhut that kept trying to tell us stuff and ended up giving me two balloons for doing a good job or something on a particular song. I sang a bit tentatively, the other guys backed me up on the singing, and it went pretty well.
Our second set was another story! This one was in the larger, more modern ‘back’ stage. The first song was ok….by the second and third song…my voice was terrible. It turns out our song “Virginia Woolf” is a bit hard to sing when you can only croak out a range of a couple notes. It was very disheartening. We pulled it out of a tailspin when we went into the theremin songs. We ended with two rockers and it wasn’t so bad…but a bit of the enthusiasm had definitely been sucked out of the room. Once again, we pulled it out just a tad when I told the audience that I’d love for them to hear this band when the singer didn’t suck…and that I’d be down in the corner with a box of free CD’s for anyone who had had the patience to see us through this ordeal. We did make a number of new friends (and got some ‘pity’ drinks) out of this move. Lots of people were quite nice about it.
Both Jamie and Olly (our friend from Bolton who’d been touring the West Coast last summer and whom we befriended) and his dad all showed up about now. Olly was doing a set at The Cavern Pub that night. Neptune, Leland and I came back to watch it—good set. Many similair songs to what I’d heard last summer, but with a band that gave it a rockin’ Stones/Faces feel. The strange sideshow was a group of guys apparently in stag show—one of them (the groom to be?) was dressed in a duck costume one-sie complete with a little duckbill and tail. Ollie: “Cheers for dressing like a duck.”
another shot from our first set--on the Cavern 'front stage'
IPO Festival bill at Cavern...our first show was at 2:30
