John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  On October 18, four months after having been invited to become a Quarryman, Paul McCartney finally took his place in the lineup. Though he had attended a few practice sessions back in August (and also joined the regular wanking school convened at Nigel Walley’s house), his stage debut had been postponed by a spell at Boy Scout camp and a visit with his father and brother to Butlins Holiday Camp in Filey, Yorkshire.

  His first appearance with the Quarrymen was at the New Clubmoor Hall, a Conservative club in the Liverpool suburb of Norris Green. The booker was one Charles McBain, aka Charlie Mac, a local impresario best known for presenting strict-tempo ballroom dancing, whose press advertisements used the motto “Always Gay.” Paul had been awarded his own instrumental spot using his f-hole Zenith on Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie.” But at the crucial moment, as he recalls, he was attacked by “nerves leading to sticky fingers. [It] was one of the first gigs I’d ever played, and the sheer terror of it got to me.” Charlie Mac adjudicated the overall performance much as he would have done a samba competition, scribbling “Good and bad” on one of Nigel Walley’s business cards.

  Despite that equivocal judgment, the Quarrymen began to make regular appearances at McBain’s various “Rhythm Nights,” chiefly at Wilson Hall opposite the Garston bus depot. Though a step up in prestige from church fetes and youth clubs, the prospect was a daunting one. Garston was famously the haunt of Liverpool’s toughest Teds outside the docks—velveteen-collared psychopaths who waged gang warfare with weapons that, in some cases, would not have shamed the Spanish Inquisition. A Garston Ted bent on a night’s pleasure first wrapped around his wrist a thick leather belt studded with industrial-size washers, its buckle filed to razor sharpness to increase its efficacy as a flail. Some sewed razor blades into their jacket revers as a surprise for anyone who tried grabbing them by the lapels.

  The only sure way not to fall foul of these awesome beings—pulling the thorn from the lion’s paw as it were—was to give them the rock ’n’ roll they loved. In this endeavor John now had an accomplice who was not only gifted at imitating Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis but could also passably simulate the dementia of rock’s ultimate chaos maker, Little Richard. One night at Wilson Hall while the Quarrymen were in midset, a massive Ted clambered up onstage and went eyeball-to-eyeball with Paul in classic Liverpool “look, pal…” mode. But it was merely to request him, quite politely in Garston terms, to sing “Long Tall Sally.”

  Paul’s presence had an immediate effect within the Quarrymen, changing what was still essentially a group of mates having a laugh into something altogether less easygoing and more focused. And the mates were not always best pleased by the improvements he suggested. One of these was that as manager Nigel Walley should no longer receive an equal share of the collective earnings because he didn’t actually appear onstage. “Walloggs,” however, successfully resisted the idea, pointing to an upswing in the standard of recent gigs, which had included a performance for the social club at Stanley Abattoir. Another of Paul’s concerns was that Colin Hanton’s drumming was not of a high enough standard. In addition to playing guitar, piano, and trumpet, Paul was a competent drummer and, as Len Garry remembers, was always beating on tabletops and chairs with his hands or sticks or even pieces of cutlery, as if to demonstrate how much better he would be at the job. But John defended Colin, thinking mainly of what a grievous loss his drum kit would be.

  The new McCartney-inspired professionalism was quickly in evidence. When the Quarrymen returned to New Clubmoor Hall to play a further gig for Charlie Mac on November 23, 1957, they had swapped their former casual mélange of plaid shirts and striped knitwear for matching black jeans, white shirts, and Western-style bootlace ties. A historic snapshot taken that night shows John and Paul sharing prominence at the front, each with his own stand microphone. While their sidemen are in shirtsleeves, they wear drape-cut jackets, which, Eric Griffiths remembers, were of a creamy or oatmeal shade. Even in that quaint, pseudo-cowboy guise, they are so obviously the only two who matter.

  A crucial factor in John’s early relationship with Paul was the concurrent reduction of Pete Shotton’s presence in his life. With the Quarrymen fully weaned to rock ’n’ roll, Pete’s skiffle washboard was now an embarrassing anachronism. But he knew John thought too much of him to drop him from the group, however much of a passenger he became. Finally, one night at a drunken party in Smithdown Road, the situation was resolved without grief or embarrassment to either side. John picked up the washboard and smashed it over Pete’s head, dislodging the central metal portion and leaving the wooden frame hanging around his neck like a collar. Pete, as he remembers, sank to the floor, weeping tears of laughter mixed with relief. “I was finished with playing but I didn’t want to say so, nor did John. This way let me out and it let John out.” Paul thus stepped neatly into Pete’s shoes as the partner, private audience, and sounding-board John could not do without.

  A major geographical coincidence also played its part in fostering their friendship. The art college to which John dispiritedly journeyed each day was literally next door to Paul’s school, the Liverpool Institute. The two seats of learning occupied the same L-shaped building whose neoclassical facade extended from Hope Street around the corner into Mount Street. Their respective populations worked in sight and earshot of one another and mingled in the cobbled streets outside during breaks and lunch periods. John was thus free to meet up with Paul privately all through the day as well as on Quarrymen business during the evening.

  But rock ’n’ roll and guitars were only part of what drew them together so immediately and powerfully in those last months of 1957. The affinity was intellectual as much as musical; they were top-of-the-form English literature students as much as would-be Elvises. Paul had read many, if not quite all, of the books that John had; he could quote Chaucer and Shakespeare and was a keen habitué of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. To his surprise, he discovered that the self-styled beer-swilling desperado who claimed to have hated all schoolwork secretly devoted hours to composing stories, poems, and playlets, all via the disciplining medium of a typewriter. For all Paul’s neat, methodical ways, he shared John’s addiction to nonsense across its full historical spectrum, Lewis Carroll to the Goons. Phrases from Lennon works-in-progress, such as “a cup of teeth” or “the early owls of the Morecambe,” produced another instant meeting of minds; the Lennon-McCartney collaboration in its earliest form consisted of sitting around and thinking up further puns for John to type.

  Paul was always conscious that John came from a social drawer above his, however much John tried to disown it. “We [the McCartneys] were in a posh area, but the council house bit of the posh area. John was actually in one of the almost posh houses in the posh area…in fact, he once told me the family used to own Woolton, the whole village.” It was also impressive that, whereas Paul and his brother had “aunties,” John had more formal and patrician-sounding “aunts,” with oddball nicknames like Mater and Harrie rather than plain, cozy Millie or Jin. For Paul, this whole Richmal Crompton, tennis-club atmosphere was summed up in the name Mimi, which he’d previously associated with 1920s flappers brandishing long cigarette holders.

  Despite his pleasing appearance, politeness, and charm, his reception at Mendips was initially not very cordial. Mimi by this point clearly could not conceive of John bringing home anyone but “scruffs” whose aim could only be to lead him even further astray. Paul later said he found her treatment of him “very patronising…she was the kind of woman who would put you down with a glint in her eye, with a smile—but she’d put you down all the same.” Mimi, for her part, felt suspicious of the way Paul invariably chose to sit on a kitchen stool at teatime as if, she said, “he always wants to look down on you.”

  At a significantly early stage, John and he began holding guitar-practice sessions away from the other Quarrymen. They tried playing seated side by side on John’s bed, but there was so little room to maneuver that the heads of their guitars ke
pt clashing together. Most times they would end up in the covered front porch, to which Mimi often banished John—and where the brickwork gave their tinny guitars an extra resonance. Sharing new chords was complicated by Paul’s left-handedness, which meant that each saw the shape in an inverted form on his companion’s fretboard, then had to change it around on his own. “We could read each other’s chords backwards,” Paul remembers, “but it also meant that if either of us needed to borrow the other’s guitar in an emergency we were forced into having to play ‘upside-down’ and this became one of the little skills that each of us developed. The truth is that neither of us would let the other re-string his guitar.”

  The McCartneys’ house in Forthlin Road was only a few minutes’ walk from the Springwood estate where John had his secondary and utterly different home. Paul was soon introduced to Julia and told of the arrangement whereby John lived with his aunt even though the mother whom he clearly adored, and who clearly adored him, was only a couple of miles away. Julia was captivated by Paul’s angelic charm and full of sympathy for the loss he’d suffered a few months before. “Poor boy,” she would say to John, with what now seems heartbreaking irony. “He’s lost his mother. We must have him round for a meal.” Paul in turn thought Julia “gorgeous” and was impressed that she could play banjo, an accomplishment which even his highly musical father did not possess. Julia was always suggesting new numbers for the two of them to learn—mostly standards like “Ramona” and “Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine,” which were to have as much influence on great songs still unwritten as would Elvis or Little Richard.

  Despite the aching lack of a mother in Paul’s life, the modest council house where he lived with his cotton salesman father and younger brother seemed to John an enviably uncomplicated place. The result was that he and his guitar spent increasing amounts of time at 20 Forthlin Road, where the parental welcome was at first not a great deal warmer than Paul’s at Mendips. Jim McCartney was too much of a realist to try to ban John from the house, but he gave Paul a warning that was to prove not ill-founded: “He’ll get you into trouble, son.”

  In his 1997 authorized biography by Barry Miles, Many Years from Now, Paul would describe how the two seeming opposites beheld a mirror image in much more than the chord-shapes on their respective fretboards:

  John, because of his upbringing and his unstable family life, had to be hard, witty, always ready for the cover-up, ready for the riposte, ready for the sharp little witticism. Whereas, with my rather comfortable upbringing, a lot of family, lots of people, very northern, “Cup of tea, love?” my surface grew to be easygoing…. But we wouldn’t have put up with each other had we each only had that surface. I often used to boss him around, and he must have appreciated the hard side in me or it wouldn’t have worked; conversely, I very much appreciated the soft side in him.

  John had a lot to guard against and it formed his personality; he was a very guarded person. I think that was the balance between us: John was caustic and witty out of necessity and, underneath, quite a warm character when you got to know him. I was the opposite, easygoing, friendly, no necessity to be caustic or biting or acerbic but I could be tough if I needed to be…The partnership, the mix was incredible. We both had submerged qualities that we each saw and knew. [We would] never have stood each other for all that time if we’d just been one-dimensional.

  The practice sessions at Paul’s generally took place on weekday afternoons when both participants would “sag off” from their respective studies at college and school. At first the sessions were simply to practice the songs they had learned, or were still struggling to learn, from records or the wireless. John in those days had a liking for purely instrumental numbers and, so Paul remembers, did “a mean version” of the Harry Lime Theme, making his Gallotone Champion sound as much like a Viennese zither as it ever possibly could.

  Bouts of playing would be punctuated by listening to the radio or to records, pun making, sex talk, and horseplay. The McCartneys had just acquired a telephone—no small thing for a council house in 1957—which Paul and John would use to make anonymous nuisance calls in funny voices to selected victims like John’s former headmaster, Mr. Pobjoy. Once they tried writing a play together about “a Christ figure named Pilchard” who was to remain enigmatically offstage throughout in the manner of Samuel Beckett’s Godot. “We couldn’t figure out how playwrights did it,” Paul remembered. “Did they work it all out and work through the chapters, or did they just write a stream of consciousness like we were doing?” Unable to resolve this dilemma, they gave up after page two.

  The idea of writing original songs to perform, rather than merely recycling other people’s, was firmly rooted in Paul’s mind well before he met John. He had begun trying it virtually from the moment he acquired a guitar, combining melodic gifts inherited from his father with a talent for mimicking and pastiching the American-accented hits of the moment. His first completed song, “I Lost My Little Girl,” had been written in late 1956, partly as a diversion from the trauma of his mother’s death, partly as an expression of it. Around the time he joined the Quarrymen, he had something like a dozen other compositions under his belt, mostly picked out on the family upright piano, including a first draft of what would eventually become “When I’m Sixty-four” (which he thought “might come in handy for a musical comedy or something”).

  For a fifteen-year-old Liverpool schoolboy—indeed, for any ordinary mortal—this was breathtaking presumptuousness. In Britain’s first rock-’n’-roll era, as for a century before it, songwriting was considered an art verging on the magical. It could be practiced only in London (naturally) by a tiny coterie of music-business insiders, middle-aged men with names like Paddy or Bunny, who alone understood the sacred alchemy of rhyming arms with charms and moon with June.

  The writing first appeared on the wall for Paddy and Bunny in November 1957, when “That’ll Be the Day” by the Crickets topped the UK singles chart. It was the most uproariously guitar-driven rock-’n’-roll song yet, with its jangly, wind-chime treble intro and solo and its underlay of thudding bass. The Crickets’ leader, twenty-one-year-old Buddy Holly, was a multifaceted innovator: the first white rock-’n’-roller to write his own songs, the first to sing and play lead guitar, the first to subsume himself into a four-person group whose name was a whimsical collective noun. Holly’s vocal style was as unique as Presley’s and, if possible, even more acrobatic, veering between manic yells, lovelorn sighs, and a hiccuping stutter that could fracture even a word like well into as many as eight syllables.

  For British boys struggling to make the leap from skiffle to rock, Holly was less a god than a godsend. Most of the previous American rock-’n’-roll hits, including almost all of Elvis’s, had been far beyond their power to reproduce with their piping little voices and tinny instruments. But the songs that Holly wrote and recorded were built on instantly recognizable chords, E’s and D’s and B7’s, their familiar changes and sequences rearranged to create a drama and stylishness they’d never seemed remotely capable of before. Equally imitable were the vocal backings, the blurry Ooo’s, Aah’s, and Ba-ba-ba’s that were presumed (mistakenly) to come from Holly’s three fellow Crickets. With these elementary tools, every fading-from-fashion skiffle group could instantly refashion itself as a top-of-the-range rock combo.

  Holly’s most radical departure from established rock-’n’-roll style was an outsize pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. Coincidentally, this was a time when the new beatnik culture, simultaneously emanating from New York and Paris, and the first screen appearances by Anthony Perkins, had led many young men to cultivate just such an earnest, intellectual air. Holly’s glasses, allied to his neat appearance and polymathic talent, made him appear like some star student, sitting exams in each sphere of rock and passing every one with honors.

  With Buddy on the charts, John no longer needed to feel his poor sight automatically cast him down among the nerds, drips, weeds, and swots. Aft
er years of fruitlessly begging him to wear his glasses, Mimi now found herself being pestered to buy him a new pair, with frames far more conspicuous than the ones he had. Mimi, of course, had no idea who Buddy Holly was or why he should have superseded Elvis as John’s mental menu for breakfast, dinner, and tea. She bought him the black horn-rims because she could refuse him nothing, in the hope that he’d now spend less of his time walking around half blind.

  She might as well have saved her money. Even Buddy Holly–style frames could not overcome John’s phobia about being seen in glasses. He put them on only when absolutely necessary, for close work at college or his practice sessions with Paul at Forthlin Road. To be allowed to see him wearing them was a mark of intimacy, granted to almost no females and only a select circle of males. Among the latter was Paul’s brother Michael, a keen amateur photographer whose lens sometimes caught the horn-rimmed John studying his guitar fretboard with a librarian’s earnestness. But by the time Mike clicked his shutter again, the horn-rims would have vanished.

  That winter of 1957–58 brought a stream of further Buddy Holly songs—“Oh Boy,” “Think It Over,” “Maybe Baby”—each intriguingly different from the last yet still as easy to take apart and reassemble as children’s building blocks. For John and Paul in their facing armchairs, it was the most natural step from playing songs Buddy had written to making up ones he might easily have done. Paul would later describe how they’d sit there, strumming Buddyish chord-sequences, exchanging Buddyish hiccups—“Uh-ho! Ah-hey! Ah-hey-hey!”—until inspiration came.

  PART II

  TO THE TOPPERMOST OF THE POPPERMOST

  MY MUMMY’S DEAD

  It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.