John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The Quarrymen did better, however, getting through to the Wednesday-night finals while the Sunnysiders’ comic dimension actually lost them points. But on the Wednesday, when winners were judged on audience applause, John’s outfit found themselves up against a group from Wales who had arrived with a busload of supporters to cheer them on. Rod Davis remembers how these Welsh skifflers used extrovert showmanship, flinging themselves around, even lying flat on the stage, “while we just stood still, like purists.” Nonetheless, the applause-measuring “Clapometer” initially showed a dead heat between the two groups. But on a retry, the Welsh group were announced to be just ahead. So Mister Star-maker—not for the only time, it would turn out—missed the greatest discovery of his life.

  Rock ’n’ roll continued to defy every forecast of its imminent self-destruction, boosted by an unexpected endorsement from Hollywood. Late 1956 had seen the release of a film comedy called The Girl Can’t Help It, originally intended as a vehicle for the huge-bosomed screen goddess Jayne Mansfield, with jibes at teenagers and their music by way of a subplot. Instead, the satire on rock somehow turned into a celebration of it—to this day, still the most potent ever captured on celluloid.

  When The Girl Can’t Help It finally reached Liverpool early in the summer of 1957, it showed John America’s new rock-’n’-roll stars as living beings for the very first time—minus Elvis, admittedly, but featuring cameo performances by others he worshipped almost as much, plus a few he’d barely heard of, all in voluptuous Eastman-color and megascreen CinemaScope. Here was Little Richard shrieking the title song in voice-over as Jayne Mansfield’s mighty cleavage sashayed along a street, making men’s glasses shatter in their frames and milk spurt out of bottles as though in premature ejaculation. Here was Eddie Cochran, a hunky young Elvis clone, singing “Twenty Flight Rock” while aiming his gorgeous vermilion guitar to left and right like a tommy gun. Here was another white newcomer, Gene Vincent, a bony ex-sailor with an eerily high and sibilant voice, keening a second classic piece of rock-’n’-roll Jabberwocky, entitled “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” Here, even more fascinatingly to John, were Vincent’s backing group, the Bluecaps: not merely tacked-on session men but fellow spirits who shared their leader’s aura of dissipation and menace, and counterpointed his vocal with almost animalistic whoops and yaps and cackles.

  The messages from jukeboxes and Radio Lux were not all uproar and anarchy. Early June brought the first chart appearance of the Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, two former child country stars whose almost feminine close harmony created some initial confusion with Britain’s own Beverley Sisters. The Everlys’ number-six hit, “Bye Bye Love,” so appealed to John’s softer, melodic side—never mind the notion of having someone so close as a brother to sing with—that he began looking around for a partner to form an Everly-style duet. Since his usual blood brother, Pete Shotton, couldn’t sing a note, he had a few tentative vocalizing sessions with Len Garry. But the closer-than-Everly brotherhood he was destined to form only a few weeks from now would not be called Lennon and Garry.

  On June 22, Liverpool celebrated the 750th anniversary of the charter it had been granted by King John. The occasion was marked by street parties throughout the city, each street competing with its neighbors in lavishness of decoration, food, and outdoor entertainment. Like several others, Rosebery Street catered to the younger element by having a skiffle group, in this case John and the Quarrymen. Rosebery Street was deep in the heart of Liverpool 8, a quarter where grammar-school boys from Woolton normally would not care to stray. But it was also the home of Charles Roberts, Colin Hanton’s printer friend, who had stenciled QUARRY MEN on his bass drum, so a quid pro quo was felt to be in order.

  The Quarrymen played on the back of a coal truck, giving one performance in the afternoon and another in the early evening. At the second, their audience included a hugely proud Julia, who made the long bus journey from Bloomfield Road, bringing John’s half sisters, Julia and Jackie. The two little girls sat on the truck’s tailboard while Julia watched from the Roberts family’s living room.

  Many cameras were in use that day, and one of them chanced to take the first-ever picture of John in performance. There he is on the coal-dusty stage, wearing the checked shirt Julia had bought him at Garston’s open-air market, singing raptly into a stand microphone whose cord extends perilously off the truck and through the open ground-floor window of the house behind, to the nearest accessible electrical outlet. His fellow Quarrymen are grouped slightly behind him, all but for little Colin Hanton, in a garish two-tone jumper, who sits some way to the left—“half-cut,” as he now admits, on pints of black velvet. The backdrop of grimy Victorian brickwork and celebration flags makes it more like a scene from the late-nineteenth century than the mid-twentieth.

  During their second show, as dusk was falling and fairy lights twinkled on overhead, Colin’s rather isolated position on the truck turned out to be providential. Just behind it stood a group of tough boys from neighboring Hatherley Street whom he overheard plotting to “get Lennon” after the show. When their last number ended, the Quarrymen did not wait for applause but bundled their instruments off the stage and sought sanctuary in Charlie Roberts’s house, where his mother regaled them with a high tea. The Hatherley Street roughs were not easily deterred, banging on the windows and calling on John to come out. The problem was solved by the arrival of a single policeman, in those days a magisterial presence, who warned off the troublemakers, then gave the Quarrymen safe escort to their bus stop.

  Summer’s ritual festivities promised more busy times ahead. On July 6, the Quarrymen were booked to appear at the annual garden fete of their own parish church, St. Peter’s, Woolton. John had lately astonished Pricey, the rector, by submitting himself for formal confirmation into the Church of England—not through any deep religious awakening, as he would later admit, but for the sake of the cash gifts that confirmation candidates traditionally receive from their families. Whether or not Pricey realized this, John was once again persona grata at St. Peter’s, and his group was not only to perform at the fete itself, but also aboard one of the motorized carnival floats that paraded through Woolton village beforehand. Shades of his grandfather Jack, in days when Andrew Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels always came to town in triumph, plinking and plunking on the back of a decorated wagon!

  BUDDIES

  It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join.

  Paul McCartney had known John well by sight for some time before their carefully arranged official introduction. To Paul, judging solely by appearances, “John was the local Ted. You saw him rather than met him…This Ted would get on the bus and I wouldn’t look at him too hard in case he hit me.”

  The two might have been expected to strike up a natural acquaintanceship, living as near to each other as they did, with close friends in common and a mutual, consuming passion for rock ’n’ roll. The main obstacle was an eighteen-month age difference between them. John, at sixteen and three quarters, was considered to be on the edge of manhood, while Paul, having only just turned fifteen, was still in the outer reaches of boyhood. The discrepancy would never be an issue once they knew each other, and would grow less noticeable with each passing year; but in their first brief encounters on the Allerton-Woolton bus, it had prevented them from exchanging even so much as a nod.

  The fact that Paul went to school with two cronies of John’s, Ivan Vaughan and Len Garry, brought no fast-track introduction either. Ivan, it so happened, had long since marked Paul down as being of potential value to the Quarrymen, but guessed how John might react if a new recruit were too pointedly shoved under his nose. So Ivy bided his time until the right moment came, which it did not do until Saturday, July 6, 1957, when the Quarrymen were to play at St. Peter’s Church fete in Woolton. Having presold Paul to John as “a great fellow,” Ivy then oh so casually invited Paul, who oh so casually agreed, to cycle over from Allerton, watch the Quarrymen in performa
nce, and say hello to their leader afterwards.

  The baby-faced fifteen-year-old whom John was to meet on this innocent summer’s afternoon—the more-than-collaborator, more-than-partner, more-than-brother destined to share his life and live in his mind and voice for almost the whole of the next decade—would always seem like his polar opposite in every possible way. Yet in their origins and family backgrounds they were remarkably similar.

  As John’s late grandfather George Stanley had done, Paul’s father, Jim McCartney, held a position of the utmost respectability in Liverpool’s mercantile world. Jim was a salesman for Hannay & Co., a firm of cotton brokers he had faithfully served for almost three decades, except for a necessary interlude in a war munitions factory. Despite the industry’s steep postwar decline, working “in cotton” remained as much a badge of prestige among Liverpool’s upper working class as having assisted salvage operations on the Thetis. With his brown chalkstripe suits, polished brogues, and stiff-collared shirts, Jim McCartney was a type of man now—sadly—almost vanished from British commerce: diligent, loyal, principled, and seemingly devoid of greed, ruthlessness, or ego.

  Like John, Paul had grown up in an atmosphere of social aspiration. His mother, Mary, was a trained nurse (like John’s Aunt Mary) who subsequently became a domiciliary midwife employed by the local authority to tend to the large numbers of women who still chose to give birth at home. This meant that, although Paul and his younger brother, Michael, were raised on the succession of council estates where their mother was based, they always had a sense of being slightly apart and special. Mary McCartney was a woman of natural refinement who encouraged her sons to try to speak more “nicely” than the estate children they played with.

  Like John, Paul came from Irish forebears, with all the lyricism and charm that implies, and had music and the instinct to perform in his genes. As a young man in the 1920s, Jim McCartney had led a small amateur dance band, to whose syncopated rhythms, it is more than likely, John’s parents, Alf and Julia, had Charlestoned or Black-Bottomed in their good times as a couple. Though Jim’s bandleading days were long past, he still played the upright piano he had bought on the installment plan from North End Music Stores (NEMS) in Walton Road. Paul had inherited his father’s instinctive musical ear and an ability to sing in harmony, which Jim encouraged with the same community-spirited maxim John had so often heard from Julia: if he could do a song or play something, he’d always be popular at parties.

  Like John, Paul had shown himself to be clever and artistic at an early age, had passed the Eleven Plus and won a place at a renowned city grammar school, Liverpool Institute in Mount Street. Like John, he wore a black uniform blazer with a Latin motto, in this case Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati (“We are born not for ourselves only, but for all the world”); like John, he excelled in English, was a fan of Richmal Crompton’s William books, and showed a talent for cartooning and caricature.

  Paul’s life had already been blighted by a tragedy that, all too soon, was to repeat itself in John’s. In October 1956, Mary McCartney died from breast cancer. After an initial period of emotional collapse, fifty-three-year-old Jim rallied heroically, teaching himself to cook and keep house for his two sons while continuing to travel for Hannay’s. The three lived a bachelor existence in the last council house Mary’s job had provided, number 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, a short bus ride away from Menlove Avenue. Without Mary’s extra income, money was tight, but a circle of good-hearted aunts helped care for Paul and Michael just as a corresponding one always had for John. Although never educated to any advanced degree, Jim was as much a proponent of reading and linguistic fluency as was Aunt Mimi: a recent spelling test at Liverpool Institute had shown Paul to be the only boy in his class able to spell phlegm.

  But Paul, while being as much an individualist as John, possessed none of John’s reckless rebelliousness. He had a profound and most un-Liverpudlian dislike of all overt aggression and confrontation, preferring to bend others to his will by charm, diplomacy, and the sometimes deceptive innocence of his oversize brown eyes.

  Well before rock ’n’ roll hit Britain, Paul had been able to pick out tunes on the family piano and, with Jim’s encouragement, had begun learning the trumpet, hitherto the most glamorous instrument on the bandstand. As soon as he heard Elvis and saw Lonnie Donegan, he took his trumpet back to Rushworth and Draper’s department store and swapped it for a £15 Zenith guitar with cello-style f-shaped sound holes. Being left-handed, he found he had to play his instrument in reverse, strumming with his left hand and shaping chords on the fretboard with his right.

  Although by now a more than proficient guitarist with an obviously usable voice, he had not been snapped up by any skiffle group—nor, apparently, sought to be. Like John, he had been captivated by the Everly Brothers’ close harmony, and vaguely planned to form an Everly-style duo with a friend named Ian James (as John had with Len Garry), but nothing came of it. On the daily bus trip to school, he’d become friendly with another Institute boy, George Harrison, who shared his fascination with guitars and rock ’n’ roll. Though George was nine months his junior, they found common ground in drawing pictures of curvaceous guitar bodies and comparing new chords, and had become close enough to go on a hitchhiking vacation together.

  The hot Saturday of July 6 did not seem an auspicious one for John. In the morning, Mendips’s mock-Tudor hallway echoed to another blazing argument when he came downstairs in his chosen outfit of drape jacket, open-necked checked shirt, and ankle-hugging black jeans. “Mimi…said to me I’d done it at last, I was a real Teddy boy,” he would recall. “I seemed to disgust everyone, not just Mimi.”

  The afternoon unfolded with the slow-motion predictability of every village pageant John had ever read about in a William story. The procession of decorated carnival floats made its way down Allerton Road, Kings Drive, and Hunts Cross Avenue, at its head the brass band of the Cheshire Yeomanry (“By permission of Lt. Col. C.G.V. Churton, M.C., M.B.E”), at its rear a flatbed coal-merchant’s truck bearing the Quarrymen. Despite the grinding slowness of the parade, it was difficult to play with any effectiveness on such an unsteady perch, and John quickly gave up, took off his guitar, and sat on the tailboard with his legs dangling. A little way on, he spotted his mother and two half sisters in the crowd. Julia the younger and Jackie walked behind the truck, trying to make him laugh, but he still regarded himself in serious performance mode and refused to respond.

  At the fete itself, his group had been allotted two brief spots, at 4:15 and 5:45, separated by a display of dog-handling from the City of Liverpool Police. By John’s own account, that afternoon was the first time he ever attempted Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula” live onstage. One can shut one’s eyes and almost hear the crazy words that, for once, he didn’t have to invent (“We-e-ll she’s the woman in the red blue jeans…” ) rising and falling against the competitive clamor of craft and homemade cake-stalls, games of hoop-la, quoits, and shilling-in-the-bucket, children’s cries, indifferent adult conversation, and birdsong. Paul McCartney, quietly checking him out from the sidelines, remembers him also doing his reworded version of “Come Go with Me.”

  A famous photograph of him in midperformance was taken by his Quarry Bank schoolfriend Geoff Rhind from directly in front of the low open-air stage. Jacketless and tousled, visibly wilting in the heat, he has the narrow-eyed, challenging look that always went with leaving off his glasses. Behind him is a screen of ragged hedge-row; to his right stand a knot of expectant-looking younger boys, rather like the village children who always collected around William, hoping he would liven things up. At one point, so the story goes, he looked down into his audience and met the horrified gaze of his Aunt Mimi. According to Mimi, she had been unaware that John was performing that afternoon until a loud clash and a familiar raspy voice penetrated the refreshment tent, where she was savoring a quiet cup of tea. She would describe how when John saw her, he turned the words he was singing into a mock-fearful ru
nning commentary: “Oh-oh, Mimi’s here! Mimi’s coming down the path….” However, his cousin Michael Cadwallader, then aged ten, remembers being at the fete in a large family group that, besides Julia and John’s two half sisters, included two more aunts, Nanny and Harrie, and his ten-year-old cousin, David. “I got the sense that we’d been rounded up to go,” Michael says. “And Mimi was the only one who could have been behind that.”

  The Quarrymen were also booked to play at the Grand Dance, which was to round off the day’s merrymaking—that is to say, they’d been given another brief youth-pleasing spot in an evening of conventional quicksteps and foxtrots by the George Edwards Band. It was while they were setting up their gear in the too-familiar surroundings of St. Peter’s Church Hall that Ivan Vaughan brought in the schoolfriend he wanted John to meet.

  Even at this early time, it seems, Paul knew how to make an entrance of maximum effect. The pop ballad hit of the summer was “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation),” written by the American country star Marty Robbins but covered in the United Kingdom by a briefly burning Elvis clone named Terry Dene. And here was Ivy’s much talked-about schoolfriend, resplendent in just such a white sport coat (or sports jacket, as the British call it)—a wide-shouldered, long-lapeled confection, dusted all over with silver flecks, reaching almost to his knees and set off by the narrowest pair of black drainies yet to have been smuggled past a vigilant father.