#6: The Cavern Club, Liverpool

Mathew Street, unlike the rest of Liverpool, hadn’t changed much in the past six years. One or two new Beatles-devoted shops had opened. Other than that, I might as well have been thirteen again, seeing the place for the first time. Then I heard something I didn’t remember. Music drifted up through an open doorway, sounding almost as if the earth itself was creating it:

            “I’m looking through you / Where did you go? / I thought I knew you / What did I know? / You don’t look different, but you have changed / I’m looking through you / You’re not the same.”

The Cavern Wall of Fame, performers who have played there.

            My parents and I moved down into the Cavern Club. Like Mathew Street above, it was almost the same as I recalled. Brick arches crisscrossed the dark room, and a guitarist pounded out Beatles songs on the stage (surprise!). Scrawled all over every surface were past visitors’ names. I spent a few happy minutes searching for my own name from ’09. I never found it – it was buried under six years’ worth of approved graffiti – but I still enjoyed seeing the scribblings. Some of the names were recent; some dated all the way back to the 1970s. It was amazing to think about the thousands of people who had passed through here, just to see the place where the Beatles had become famous.

Inside the Cavern.

            I sat underneath an arch, my back to the worn bricks, as close to the stage as I could get. I’d heard and played all the songs before, thousands of times: “Blackbird,” “I’ll Follow The Sun,” “Something.” But here in the Cavern, they took on the same magical quality they’d had the night I first heard them. The music’s creators began in this club. And since I owed my interest in music to the Beatles, in a way, my own life as a musician started here too.

            The guitarist entered the endless coda of “Hey Jude.” Almost spontaneously, the people in front of the stage started singing along, as usual. With the guitarist’s encouragement, the rest of the club joined in. Not for the first time on this trip, I brushed my eyes with my hand before going back to my parents’ table.