Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  The very next night, Paul showed up at George’s house with his Zenith. They dug out the guitar manual that had come with George’s cheap guitar and started strumming. By the end of the evening Paul had learned two chords and could play and sing “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O,” while George’s long-suffering but good-natured family sat there and passed the occasional comment.

  Dressed in a too-large, draped, white sports jacket and skintight black trousers that he’d taken in himself, Paul did some pretty fancy playing the day he officially met John at a church fete in a field next to St. Peter’s Parish Church in the village of Woolton, half a mile to the north of us. It was in July, shortly before school broke up for the summer of 1957. On the posters that were pinned up everywhere we read that the Quarrymen were playing at the fete, which was to crown the Rose Queen. There would be floats and games and live music, and police dogs would be put through their paces, so my brothers and George and I and a few of our mates jumped on our bicycles and made our way there, throwing our bikes in the hedge.

  Paul had been dragged along by Ivan Vaughn, his friend from school, who said he would introduce him to the Quarrymen—which explains why Paul had dressed so carefully. He intended to make an impression. The first half of the Quarrymen’s show was on a stage outdoors. Aunt Mimi turned up and was startled to see John in his Teddy Boy outfit of skintight jeans, long jacket and bootlace tie. He started singing, “Mimi’s coming, oh, oh, Mimi’s coming down the path.” Not many people in the audience realized that John was improvising.

  The band’s evening session was to be held in the church hall, and they carried all their instruments there and set up for later. When John went for a break, encouraged by Pete Shotton, Paul picked up John’s guitar and played a few chords. Baffled, he realized it was tuned all wrong. Quickly Paul changed it from the banjo tuning. He played and sang “Long Tall Sally” and then launched into a virtuoso version of ‘Twenty Flight Rock” when John returned. It was a long song, with many verses and a chorus that was similar to “Rock Around the Clock,” but Paul seemed to know it all the way through. To John, this was an achievement, given that he never seemed to know all the words of the songs he sang and always improvised wildly. Not that many people noticed; they were too busy jiving and twisting away.

  I was roaming around the fete with George and the lads when we heard the sound of the guitar coming from the church hall. We wandered over and saw Lennon looming over Paul in his owlish, shortsighted way, trying to make out the notes Paul was playing.

  “He stank of beer,” Paul said. “I didn’t look up because I had to concentrate on where my fingers went, and at first I thought he was some drunken old git.”

  Despite this going down as the legendary “first meeting” in the Beatles iconography, Paul and John already knew each other. They had mutual friends; their mothers had been acquainted and they’d seen each other “around,” in the way we all had for years. However, I think this was the moment when they became really “aware” of each other, through a mutual interest in music. They started chatting and Paul offered to write out the lyrics to a couple of verses of “Twenty Flight Rock.” John, being John, was his usual sarky self, but Paul shrugged it off. Most Liverpudlians had taken a master class in sarcasm. Paul scribbled out the words on the back of a program and handed them over. John barely glanced at them, but he did stuff the program into his pocket.

  When John had heard Paul sing he recognized that there was something about his voice that would harmonize perfectly with his own. But he wasn’t going to tell that to this cocky, young, fifteen-year-old with short back-and-sides—and his guitar! And the little bastard had taken the liberty of tuning it up. Later, this became George’s job.

  Encouraged by Ivan Vaughan, Paul kept turning up with his own guitar and hanging out around them after school. If they were rehearsing, he’d join in. He’d sing a bit, tune John’s guitar, or play something during a break so they could hear how good he was. However, John kept resolutely ignoring him. After a couple of weeks of brooding about this young whippersnapper who was almost as good as he himself was—better in fact, because he could play real guitar, not banjo-style—John finally relented and decided to ask him to join his group, but in his own way.

  A couple of evenings later, Paul was riding his bicycle home across Allerton Golf Course when he bumped into Pete Shotton. “John said you can join us if you want,” Pete offered casually.

  “Yeah, okay,” Paul said, equally casually. But he flew home like the wind and grabbed his guitar, playing in a frenzy, daydreaming about being in a real group, one that got bookings and was sometimes paid. Best of all was the thought he might soon be up on a stage—something Paul never got tired of. To celebrate, he lost his virginity that evening—and then told his mates. The news flew around. “Hey, guess what? Paul’s shagged a girl!” There wasn’t much that happened that we didn’t hear about.

  John suffered from dyslexia, but he was good at art and was always doodling in notebooks. Students were required to attend school until the age of sixteen, but most youngsters who left school at that age didn’t have much of a future. Mimi discussed the options with John’s headmaster and it was decided that he might do well at art school. The head wrote a special letter of recommendation and John was accepted at Liverpool School of Art in the autumn term of 1957 shortly before his seventeenth birthday.

  Conveniently, the art school was right next door to the Institute where Paul was a student. Elvis and rock ’n’ roll were considered very uncool by the art students, but John didn’t care what they thought. He and Paul met up all the time in the adjoining graveyard during their lunch breaks and jammed. As the weather grew colder, they would regularly bunk off to practice and write what would become “the songs.” It was Paul who showed John how to play chords properly, instead of banjo chords, which were all John knew. I think John was quite defensive when he realized that through much of his “career” with the Quarrymen, he had been playing two-fingered banjo chords on a guitar. The thought was tempered by the fact that nobody had noticed. John once told me, “Only that fookin’ McCartney sussed me out. I love him, but he’s such a good musician, I could kill him.”

  Suddenly, John, Paul and George desperately wanted to learn how to play properly and well. When Paul got a handle on a new chord he showed George or John; or if George suddenly grasped something new, excitedly, he would whiz around to show Paul, who in turn showed John. Sometimes John and Paul went to Julia’s house, but mostly they wrote in Paul’s house, which was empty during the day. (Paul’s dad said they were always starving and consumed mountains of baked beans on toast.) They listened to records and learned to play all the songs recorded by their American heroes, as well as standard skiffle tunes by Lonnie Donegan and Johnny Duncan. They copped from Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly and soon, apart from their own songs, they had a huge repertoire.

  Their own songs were born on scraps of paper and in exercise books. When they weren’t playing, they were constantly writing in every spare moment. I remember these numerous bits of paper well. It seemed as if everywhere John and Paul went—later on it was in vans and tour buses, hotel rooms and cafes—these scraps of paper were always floating around. They were stuffed into their pockets or guitar cases. Often, they were simply abandoned. Later, they were sometimes tidied up by hotel maids and thrown away. How I wish I had collected them together, but they were just random words and half sentences, scribblings that had little bearing on the songs that emerged. By the time they cracked it, they had more than enough material for their first albums.

  Throughout the autumn of 1957 John let Paul perform at a few casual gigs, but it wasn’t until January of 1958 that he admitted Paul was good enough to play on their second Cavern gig. I heard all about it from an excited George, who thought the world of John and followed him around almost everywhere. George was in the Rebels with his chums, but it was not like being in a real group, a serious group.

  To George, the Quarrymen instantly r
epresented the big time. They were becoming the better of the bands in our small area, although at the time they weren’t as famous locally as the Sunnyside Skiffle Group. John and Paul had a strange fascination with handicapped people and it so happened that the guy who played the tea-chest bass for Sunnyside was Nicky Cuff, a midget who lived around the corner from us. He stood on top of the actual tea chest to play, which cracked up John and Paul, but they didn’t laugh so hard when Sunnyside won the “Search for a Star” competitions, and the Quarrymen—who had temporarily named themselves “Johnny and the Moondogs”—lost out. After winning a competition at the Empire Theater in Manchester, Sunnyside got to play at Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which was just sensational. But locally the Quarrymen were catching up fast and got good, proper gigs every two weeks. George told me that he had begged John to let him join the band, like Paul.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He told me to fuck off,” George said. Then he grinned that wide smile which lit up his whole face. “But I’m not going to give in.”

  So George continued to follow John everywhere. He even sidled up to audaciously invite him to the pictures, and got the usual response he had come to expect from his hero: “Fuck off!” But finally he succeeded in his mission just a month later after a gig when the Quarrymen had played at the Morgue Skiffle Cellar, which was run by another pal, Alan Cadwell and his Texans (Ringo Starr was to join the Texans a few weeks later). It was all happening!

  On a freezing March night George and I hung around the Morgue afterward and jumped on the last bus with the lads. Upstairs was almost empty and George, who had lugged his guitar along, suddenly launched into the instrumental, “Raunchy.”

  Paul, who was in on George’s determination to join them, winked and said to John, “See, he can play it, and he can play it all the way through!” Joe Cool just hunched into his jacket and gazed into space. But a couple of days later when they were writing a song, Paul said casually, “What do you think of George?” John nodded and said, “Yeah, he’s great”—and that was it. George was in.

  3

  No sooner was John getting to know his mother when, in the summer of 1958, she was run over and killed yards away from Mimi’s house by a speeding policeman who was late for work. Another policeman came to the door and broke the news. In a rare display of emotion, John once told me he was gutted.

  Julia’s death threw him completely off the rails. He was just seventeen years old and, to his mind, an orphan. He became more bitter and cynical, his behavior even more bizarre, although he was at art school where strange behavior was often the norm. Stories filtered back to us about how John was. Our parents would comment, “Poor boy, he’s taking it hard.” He would sit in the windows of an upstairs hall, knees hunched to his chest and stare into space—what shell-shocked troops called the “thousand yard stare”—apparently not hearing when he was spoken to. He talked to himself. Ranted when walking along, so people steered clear of him. He started fights, blindly, lashing out at his best friends. Arms and legs flying, he had to be held back but, frenzied, he would break free and run off. Girlfriends complained that he screamed at them and sometimes hit them in the face for no reason. His anguish was so great that he even tried to run off to sea. But Mimi found out he’d signed up with the Seaman’s Union and dragged him back.

  Maybe it would have been better if John hadn’t felt so rejected by both his parents, but no one had ever told him that his father had once come back for his family after the war and discovered that John and Julia were living with another man. The adults had an argument and Fred left. (Years later, a deeply kept family secret was to emerge. John’s half sisters learned that after Fred disappeared the first time, in June 1945 their mother had a daughter, Victoria, by another man, a Welsh soldier named Taffy Williams. This was quite a scandal and John’s grandfather, “Plops” Stanley, who had taken in Julia and young John to live at the family home in Penny Lane, insisted that the baby be given away for adoption. Julia went on to meet someone else by whom she had two daughters, someone who didn’t get on with John, so she gave John to her sister, Mimi. But by then, “Plops” was dead, so she could do as she liked.)

  There was something else besides the music that connected John and Paul, almost in a spiritual way. The loss of their mothers had an enormous emotional impact that they bottled up and couldn’t discuss with anyone. In quieter moments, they sometimes shared their feelings, not in words, but on an intuitive level, something they couldn’t do with their other friends. I only came to recognize how this was years later because Liverpool kids were tough. Even middle-class ones, as we in our little clique mostly were, would have been embarrassed to show our feelings, certainly not to each other. We had an expression, “Don’t get real on me, man,” which meant, “Keep your feelings to yourself.” It was all bottled inside and we just grew up and got on with life. Sometimes, this made for a brittle shell and, as in John’s case, a ruthless and cynical edge.

  Paul missed his mother so much that the first song he wrote, when he was fourteen, “I Lost My Little Girl,” was really about her. At the time, he said he didn’t appreciate that it was about his mother. Lots of teenagers, filled with angst and change, moodily wrote poetry; it was unusual to write songs. Although Paul was impressed by a song that his dad had written, Jim McCartney dismissed his own efforts. When praised, he said, “I didn’t write it, I just made it up,” a sentiment that left a crucial impression on Paul, making him believe that songs had no real monetary value. Both he and John were to pay dearly for this mistake. (In 1968, Paul was to write a poignant song, “Lady Madonna,” which was also about his mother. Although the song was very upbeat and rocky with elements of both New Orleans and Big Band jazz, it had a motherly image that was to be a recurrent theme in Paul’s work, in his dreams and in his unconscious desire to find the ideal woman to replace her.)

  I think John, Paul and George first took themselves seriously as a band and grew almost zealous in their passion to make music when Buddy Holly and the Crickets came to Liverpool and rocked our socks off at the Philharmonic Hall. In a strange preview of my future job, assessing songs as a record promoter, I had just won a competition in the New Musical Express where you had to predict the next week’s top three chart records. My selection wasn’t just potluck; I had used judgment. The prize was to see Buddy Holly and to meet him and the Crickets at the Philharmonic Hall.

  I’d already seen Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran when they were on tour, so I was well into all the American pop stuff. But Buddy Holly was my idol and Mum had already bought tickets, so I got to go twice. It was fantastic. It was the first time that a rock and roll show had been allowed at the Philharmonic Hall instead of the Liverpool Empire. Buddy Holly and the Crickets were so loud that I think the management started to have second thoughts. We kids loved it, singing and shouting our heads off. Of course, the Quarrymen went, with George, Paul and John. Afterward, I came in for a lot of stick and a few envious comments because during the intermission I was taken backstage and introduced to Buddy and the two Crickets, Jerry and Joe, and to the compere, Des O’Connor. Predictably, this made for a bit of a buzz at school. I was now “Tony who had been taken to meet Buddy Holly and the Crickets—and he saw both shows!” It was like I was suddenly famous, and in a way, I was.

  The show inspired the Quarrymen to greater heights. They decided to go after a record deal though they went about it in the way that all hopeful kids do, by cutting a cheap demo and lending it to all their mates to play to death. George was full of this “first single,” which he brought around for us to hear. It was amateur and pretty awful, scratchy and quite raucous, a 78 shellac demo they’d had made in a back bedroom of Percy Phillips, a man they knew who cut demos on just about the only record pressing machine in Liverpool—at 38 Kensington Road. But still, it was “Oh wow!” as we crowded around the record player. This was a real record, and scratchy or not, it sounded authentic, like the beginning of something. They did Bud
dy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” and “In Spite of All the Danger,” with John singing lead on both songs. We were very impressed as George enthused about making records and getting a deal.

  “How will you do that?” I asked.

  “John is going to send this to a deejay he knows and see if he’ll play it on his show,” George said confidently. “Then someone will hear it and we’ll get discovered.”

  We all knew about being discovered, like Elvis. Being discovered was how the system worked. My brothers and I passed the shellac flimsy to each other, handling it as if it were pure gold, hardly noticing the pasted-on handwritten white label. This was rock ’n’ roll—show biz! We must have listened to it twenty times over a couple of hours, singing along to the songs, while George bathed in the glow of our admiration and the beckoning fame, which was just around the corner.

  Eventually, Mum came in from the kitchen where she’d been making tea and with good humor said, couldn’t we listen to something else?

  “How much did this cost, George?” I asked, lifting it off the turntable and fingering it like an icon.

  “One pound,” George said. It seemed a huge amount. For me, it would have been two whole weeks of newspaper round earnings—and that made it all the more awesome. He giggled as he said that when they went to get it cut, they had only been able to scrape seventeen shillings together and had to go back the next day with another three bob which they’d somehow managed to scrounge before Percy let them take the demo away.