John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Meanwhile, the Beatles were touring the snowy wastes of midland and northern Britain as the humblest and lowest-paid attraction on an Arthur Howes package show headlined by Helen Shapiro. In 1961, while they were far away in Hamburg, Shapiro had become the sensation of British pop—a fourteen-year-old London schoolgirl with a voice low and smoky enough to be mistaken for a man’s. At sixteen, she was a cross between a diva and a Jane Austen heroine, following behind the tour bus in her own chauffeured limousine and sheltered from the crudity and loucheness of life on the road by a middle-aged chaperone.

  The Beatles had the least prestigious position at the start of the show: an eight-to-ten-minute spot, allowing for perhaps four numbers, that to St. Pauli’s all-night ravers seemed to come and go with barely a blink. If not in dove-gray Cardin mode, they wore charcoal or black suits with high-fastening jackets on which the new deep-cut, button-down shirt collars sat as weightily as neck braces. In continuing rebellion against their new bespoke image, John habitually left his top shirt button undone and his tie crooked; often before they went onstage, in an almost wifely—or motherly—gesture, Paul would stand him still and do up the button for him. After the last song, following Brian’s formula, the three guitarists performed a synchronized low bow, steadying their guitar necks with one hand. “John’s other hand would always be behind his back, doing something it shouldn’t,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “Waggling its fingers or making a V-sign.”

  Aboard the bus, their knockabout humor was one of the few consolations for the long, slushbound journeys between gigs and the perishing cold. Even the precious Infanta Helen took to leaving the heated interior of her limousine and dodging her chaperone to sit beside John as he covered the steamed-up window with cartoon figures or rubbed a clear patch through which to make hideous grimaces at unsuspecting passers-by. Confident that fame was only just around the corner, he and Paul would each borrow a stack of Helen’s giveaway photographs and retire to the backseat to practice signing autographs across her smiley, bouffant-crowned face.

  On February 8, when the tour reached Carlisle, the Beatles made national headlines for the very first time. After that evening’s performance at the ABC cinema, they accompanied their headliner to a dance organized by the town’s Young Conservatives and were asked to leave for being inappropriately dressed in black leather jackets. On the scale of pop-star misbehavior, it was pretty trifling, especially compared with John’s riper exploits in Hamburg. But Britain’s newspaper readers were never to know them as badder boys than this.

  On February 22, the New Musical Express chart showed “Please Please Me” sharing the number one position with Frank Ifield’s “The Wayward Wind”; a week later, it occupied the summit alone. The Beatles had been notified of their triumph a few days in advance, so Bob Wooler could announce it at the Cavern when they played there on February 19 during a brief furlough from the Helen Shapiro tour. Wooler expected cheering and applause; instead, the entire three front rows of hardcore female fans burst into tears. For they knew they had lost their private idols forever.

  For any pop act with a hit single, the next step was a 33 rpm, twelve-inch long-player, traditionally representing the poorest possible value for the money. Though available since the early fifties, LPs were still a minuscule part of the record business, selling only tens of thousands while singles sold millions. In the worlds of balladeering and jazz, where they were more classily known as albums, time and expense might be lavished to showcase the differing facets of a Sinatra, a Louis Armstrong, or a Johnny Mathis. With pop performers who got lucky, the LP was simply a means of recycling a chart hit and its B-side, augmented by a haphazard selection of cover versions and standards. The album cover would be a crude color photograph; on the monochrome reverse would be a list of the tracks, some biographical notes, and, if the product were from EMI, a recommendation to use Emitex cleaning solvent for keeping record grooves free of dust and fluff.

  In setting up the first Beatles LP—preemptively titled Please Please Me—George Martin faced two problems. First, even with a chart-topper to their credit, EMI was unwilling to spend more than a pittance on the endeavor; second, their touring schedule left precious little time for working in the studio. On the plus side, however, was Martin’s experience in recording shows and revues with an atmosphere of intimacy and spontaneity. Two singles and their B-sides (“P.S. I Love You” and “Ask Me Why”) were already in the can, which meant cutting ten more tracks in short order. Having managed to assemble the Beatles at Abbey Road on November 11, Martin decided to record them as nearly like a live act as possible. He told them to play the best items from their stage act just as if the Cavern audience were watching, and switched his equipment on.

  The result was a feat of stamina as impressive as anything Hamburg had ever seen. Although still tired from their long drive south through the snows, and racked by winter coughs and sniffles, they managed to complete the LP in a single all-day session, using no stimulants beyond tea and Zubes throat lozenges. Four of the tracks were John-Paul compositions: “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Misery,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” and “There’s A Place.” The others were their favorite left-field cover versions of black American pop.

  Listening to the album today, one still catches the excitement of Paul McCartney’s opening “One-two-three-FAW!”—the prelude to so many unbelievable things ahead. Almost every one of its fourteen tracks now seems fresh and surprising enough to have been issued as a single: from Paul’s near-jazzy vocal on “A Taste of Honey,” evoking all those modish “kitchen sink” films and plays, to the anomalously cheery teenage angst of “There’s a Place” and “Misery,” to the unabashed borrowings from black female groups, the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You” and “Boys” and the Cookies’ “Chains.” The effect was the total opposite of usual shortchanging LPs, revealing how vastly more skillful and versatile and experimental and eccentric the Beatles actually were than had been revealed on their two singles to date, and also subtly suggesting the world they inhabited as well as the extraordinary range of styles at their command. Every song, every guitar note, every Scouse-thickened chorus of “Sha-la-la” and “Bop-shoowop” hinted what fun it was to be them.

  Paul is, naturally, omnipresent and precociously brilliant, and George is in there too, far more than one appreciated at the time. But John is the dominant presence, as much so in backup as in lead: the chanting harmonica, the voice that keeps its rock-’n’-roll buzz through the most lovelorn ballads, the occasional note of sarcasm but more constant one of utter sincerity, the tough tenderness that now and again speaks directly to “You, girl.” And John’s is the show-stopping track, the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” screamed out with such desperate abandon at the very end of the eleven-hour session that Martin had serious fears for his vocal cords. “I was always bitterly ashamed of it,” he would recall, “because I could sing it better than that…. You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best.”

  John and Paul’s own songs were by now accumulating in something more than a dog-eared school exercise book. Through George Martin, Brian met Dick James, a tubby, avuncular man who had recently turned to music publishing after a moderately successful career as a dance-band vocalist. James secured publishing rights to “Please Please Me” and its B-side, “Ask Me Why,” as a quid pro quo for getting the Beatles’ their all-important first appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars. To ensure that subsequent John-Paul compositions did not go elsewhere, he came up with a plan that, for hidebound, grasping Tin Pan Alley, was little short of revolutionary. Rather than publishing their future work under the imprimatur of Dick James Music, at the standard minuscule royalty for sheet-music sales and radio plays, he set up a self-contained company, dealing exclusively in Lennon-McCartney songs and splitting the income, 50 percent to James and his business partner, 20 percent each to the composers and 10 percent to Brian. The company was called Northern Songs, a name redolent of newly modish factory chimneys a
nd rain-shiny cobblestones.

  Having now each enjoyed the triumph of having both their words and their music on a hit single, John and Paul might easily have evolved into autonomous songwriters, feeding the same group. But the habit persisted of working together, batting words and tunes back and forth, shuttlecock-wise, as they used to in the McCartneys’ living room. “We wrote together because we enjoyed it,” Paul would remember. “It was the joy of being able to write, to know you could do it. There was also the bit about what ‘they’ would like. The audience was always in my head, ‘They’ll dance to this’ and such. So most of the songs were oriented just to the dances.”

  The habit also stuck of giving every song their joint byline, no matter how much one had contributed and how little the other. The double credit, so they both felt, had an impressive, Broadway musical kind of feel to it, like Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe. Their earliest efforts, listed in Paul’s exercise book, had always been called “Lennon-McCartney Originals.” On the Please Please Me album, their own songs were credited to “McCartney-Lennon”; thereafter, the formula reverted to “Lennon-McCartney,” a brand ultimately ranking with Broadway’s finest. To belong to such a fabulous creative entity might seem more than enough for any mortal. But years later, as its surviving member, Paul would reveal what bitterness he had always felt in coming second. “I wanted it to be McCartney-Lennon, but John had the stronger personality and I think he fixed things with Brian before I got there. That was John’s way. He was one and a half years older than me, and at that age it meant a little more worldliness.

  “I remember going to a meeting and being told, ‘We think you should credit the songs to Lennon-McCartney.’ I said, ‘No, it can’t be Lennon first, how about McCartney-Lennon?’ They all said, ‘Lennon-McCartney sounds better, it has a better ring.’…But I had to say ‘All right, sod it’—although we agreed that if we ever wanted it could be changed around to make me equal.”

  At roughly the same time, another decision was taken that in years to come would store up further below-surface resentment, like Philip Larkin’s “deepening coastal shelf.” “It was an option to include George in the songwriting team,” Paul would later admit. “I remember walking up past Woolton church with John one morning and going over the question. Without wanting to be too mean to George, should three of us write or would it be better to keep it simple? We decided we’d just keep the two of us.”

  As the Beatles’ in-house publicist, Tony Barrow initially projected them according to pop-idol conventions of the time. Among his first presentational suggestions to Brian was rebranding them as John Lennon and the Beatles, to conform with the Cliff-Richard-and-the-Shadows stereotype. “Putting Paul’s name out there as front man would have been just as OK with me, and I don’t think Paul would have had any problem with it. But Brian explained very firmly that the Beatles weren’t like that. They were a democracy.”

  A time-honored format for covering beat groups in music papers were Life Lines, or biographical questionnaires that each member filled in himself. The accepted tone was a mixture of earnestness in the boxes about musical taste and influences, and flippancy in the personal ones. John’s Life Lines, as circulated by Tony Barrow, set a new standard in both categories:

  Height: 5, 11. Weight: 11, 5 [159 lbs]. Colour of hair: brown. Colour of eyes: brown. Brothers, sisters: no. Age entered show business: 20. Hobbies: writing songs, poems and plays; girls, painting, TV, meeting people. Favourite singers: Shirelles, Miracles, Chuck Jackson, Ben E. King. Favourite actors: Robert Mitchum, Peter Sellers. Favourite actresses: Juliette Greco, Sophia Loren. Favourite foods: curry and jelly. Favourite drinks: whisky and tea. Favourite car: bus. Favourite clothes: sombre, Favourite [big] band: Quincy Jones. Favourite instrumentalist: Sonny Terry. Favourite composer: Luther Dixon. Likes: blondes, leather. Dislikes: stupid people. Tastes in music: R&B, Gospel, Personal ambition: to write musical. Professional ambition: to be rich and famous.

  Where collective publicity like interviews or personal appearances were concerned, Barrow usually told Paul McCartney what was required and he rounded up the others. “Paul was a born diplomat, and always had an instinctive understanding of what journalists wanted. I tended to be a bit wary of John at the beginning. In his eyes you were his enemy until you’d proved yourself as his friend. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was all bravado—that it came from a lack of self-confidence. John was the one of the Beatles it took me longest to get through to. But once that happened, he became the best friend I had in the group.”

  Despite having Barrow on the case full-time, Brian was open to anyone else who might have power to secure his boys a single additional column inch. Backstage at Thank Your Lucky Stars he had met Andrew Loog Oldham, a nineteen-year-old publicist who would later enjoy almost as spectacular a managerial career as his own. Oldham was already in partnership with Brian’s original London PR rep, Tony Calder and, during early and mid 1963, he took over from Calder in the Beatles’ media blitz.

  With the national popular press still largely indifferent to youth culture, and the “quality” press seemingly not even aware of it, the best route to their target audience was through magazines produced specifically for teenage girls, such as Jackie and Boyfriend. Oldham therefore lost no time in taking them to Boyfriend’s office, just off Regent Street, and turning them loose on the magazine’s staff writer, a stunningly attractive blonde-bouffanted nineteen-year-old named Maureen O’Grady. “We did a photo shoot with them in the little studio we had upstairs,” she recalls. “Pop stars in those days tended to get a bit above themselves…wearing silk suits with camel-hair coats slung around their shoulders. Craig Douglas used to smoke a cigarette in a holder. But the Beatles were just so friendly and down-to-earth. They called me ‘Mo’ right away, as if I’d known them all my life.

  “In one of the first pieces I ever wrote on them, I made a really silly mistake about John. I was so young and naïve that I assumed everyone had a mother and a father just like I did, so I mentioned John’s mother without checking as if she was somewhere up there in Liverpool. When I next saw the Beatles, John said, ‘There was something wrong in what you printed about me,’ and then he took me on one side and explained that his mother was dead. I was very upset, and apologised, but he was perfectly calm and nice about it. Because I admitted my mistake and said sorry, he just forgave me and never mentioned it again.”

  Boyfriend’s good opinion was so vital that Brian arranged for O’Grady and a photographer to go up to Liverpool and catch the Beatles in one of their very last ballroom appearances in the city, then join them afterward at the Blue Angel club. “That was the first time I ever saw how brutal John could be with Brian. I was with them in the dressing room when Brian came in, doing his efficiency number, like ‘Now then, what’s the running-order tonight?’ John really laid into him…‘The music’s our business, you just do the bookings and take your percentage….’ Epstein said nothing, just fiddled with a sheet of paper and drifted away.”

  More important than any print medium in first bringing the Beatles to national attention was the radio wavelength that had once brought John The Goon Show, Dick Barton—Special Agent, and Life with the Lyons. They had auditioned for the BBC Light Programme back in February 1962, and passed, albeit with some reservations. (“Paul McCartney—no. John Lennon—yes,” the producer jotted at the time.) On January 26, 1963, they made their first appearance on Saturday Club, a two-hour live performance show that John and Paul had each listened to avidly on their Saturday-morning lie-ins since its launch in the tea-chest-and-washboard era as Saturday Skiffle Club.

  Sunday mornings brought further atypical swathes of live pop in Easy Beat, an hour-long show, almost replicating Saturday Club’s ten million listeners, sandwiched between morning worship and The Archers. Both programs—like TV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars—were emceed by Brian Matthew, a thirty-five-year-old former actor who, unusually, combined the starchy tones of a classic BBC announcer wit
h a genuine interest in pop music and musicians. It was Matthew who had bestowed the Beatles’ highest accolade to date, calling them “musically and visually the most accomplished group to emerge since The Shadows.”

  Whether Saturday Club or Easy Beat, the format was the same. The Beatles would give a live studio performance, without any technical enhancement, often reaching far back into their Hamburg repertoire for R&B or pop covers they no longer played onstage and would never record. In between would come Goonish repartee with an indulgent Brian Matthew that listeners soon began to enjoy as much as the music.

  JOHN (shouting): OK, Ring’?

  RINGO (in distance): All right, John. Can you hear me?

  JOHN (to Matthew): Can you hear him?

  MATTHEW: Not really. I hope not.

  JOHN (in whisper, as if Ringo is geriatric patient): We’ve brought you the flowers.

  RINGO: Oh, good.

  JOHN: And the grapes.

  RINGO: Oh, I like grapes.

  PAUL: He likes grapes, you know.

  JOHN: Brian’s nose is peeling, listeners.

  Among the PR duties entrusted to Tony Barrow by Brian, none was more important than preserving the fantasy of John’s bachelor-hood. No Fleet Street newspaper of this era cared whether or not a newly successful pop musician was married and about to become a father. But to magazines like Boyfriend, it certainly was an issue. “Rumours started to go around that John had a wife hidden away up in Liverpool,” Maureen O’Grady remembers. “But when I asked him if it was true, he always denied it. And on the tours and when the Beatles were down in London, he always acted like a totally free agent.”