A Weird Echo

March 10, 1961

The Beatles play the Cavern for lunch.  Ray McFall has them booked three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, most weeks.  In the evening they appear at the Grosvenor Ballroom and St John's Hall, Tuebrook.

While I was watching the American Football Championship game, aka the Superbowl, this year, I was myself bowled over by an odd sideways reference to the Beatles that only a real fan would catch.  It is in the Stella Artois beer commercial starring Adrien Brody.  Brody appears as a chanson singer in a French jazz cellar, obviously the Caveau de Huchette in Paris, which was the original model for the Cavern Club in Liverpool.  Watch the commercial here.  You can almost smell the cigarette smoke mingling with Chanel No 5.  What a wonderful bit of film!

As well as new beginnings, the story of the Beatles also contains its share of melancholy endings.  The Grosvenor Ballroom gig is the beginning of the end for a very important personage in this story.  It is the last job arranged by their quasi-manager and owner of the Jacaranda Club, Alan Williams.  If you've been paying attention, you  know how important Williams and the Jac are to the Beatles early development and how they played a crucial role in getting them to Hamburg last year.  "The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on."  Omar Khayyam.