Twisted Tales: Liverpool Wildman Rory Storm Gets Left Behind in Beatles' Wake

In working-class Liverpool, Alan Caldwell was the "Golden Boy." Tall, blond and athletic, a soccer player and a superb cross-country runner, he was also a fanatic for the new sound of rock 'n' roll. By the late 1950s, when local boys named Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were knocking around the coffeeshops as the Quarrymen, Caldwell was a local demigod.

He changed his name -- first to Jett Storm, then to Rory Storm -- and formed a group called the Hurricanes. He started a skiffle club in the basement of a retired nurses' home, naming it the Morgue. The Quarrymen were an opening act for the flamboyant Storm, who took the stage in pink suits and gold lamé shirts and made a conspicuous display of grooming his thick coif with an oversize comb.

While the teenagers in Liverpool were digging the quaint, homemade sound of skiffle and what Englanders called "trad jazz," Rory Storm and the Hurricanes dove headfirst into the chaotic rock 'n' roll of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. When they played Jerry Lee Lewis' 'Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On' at the Liverpool Jazz Festival, they were booed offstage. It only made them rock harder.

Fifteen-year-old George Harrison was desperate to audition for the group (and he did have an "in," as he had once dated Rory's sister Iris), but he was just a kid. Eventually, Paul McCartney (who would also have a romance with Rory's sis) convinced his fellow Quarrymen to take on the young guitarist. Meanwhile, a local drummer named Richard Starkey joined the Hurricanes. Just as other band members had taken Western stage names like Johnny Guitar (the group was initially known as the Raving Texans), Ritchie adopted the name Ringo, after John Wayne's character in 'Stagecoach' (or the Ringo Kid of American comics).

The Hurricanes got to know the Beatles, the group the Quarrymen had become, when both bands were hired to play long nights at the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg, Germany. Storm, by then billed as "Mr. Showmanship," won a bet with the Beatles when he was first to break the club's flimsy stage, jumping hard enough to splinter the planks laid across beer crates. Accident-prone, he once fell 30 feet from a balcony and broke his leg. On another occasion he crashed through a glass skylight.

The Beatles, kids who felt they were going places, famously recruited Ringo away from the Hurricanes in 1962. Despite Storm's reputation as a top-notch act and Ringo's promises to help him land a recording deal, the Hurricanes never cashed in on the Merseybeat craze. For all his antics, Storm, who had a pronounced stutter, was a bit of a mama's boy who still lived at home -- Stormsville, he called it. He was, his sister recalled, "happy to be the King of Liverpool."

By the late 1960s, Storm was taking jobs as a water-skiiing instructor and an ice-rink DJ, a forgotten footnote in Liverpool music history. His father's sudden death brought him closer than ever to his beloved mother, Vi. One night in October 1972, suffering from a chest infection, he took some sleeping pills to get some rest. The pills didn't mix well with the scotch he'd been drinking. When his body was discovered, they also found his mother's body. Friends presumed she'd found her son dead and taken enough sleeping pills to join him.

Ringo Starr didn't make it to the funeral. When asked why, he replied, "I wasn't there when he was born, either."