The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Indeed, Mary would run herself ragged trying to keep up with those boys. They were always off on a rousing bicycle adventure whose itinerary rounded downhill through the lacy arc of nearby countryside. Beyond Speke itself the topography changed and the road fed into the green-striped fields that converged on Dungeon Lane. On those occasions when Michael was allowed to tag along, the brothers left the estate by that route and traversed the steep embankment that bordered the Mersey. From the top of the rise, they could see the entire northern coast: the unkempt sliver of beach that limned the shore to Hale Head, where an old lighthouse stood sentry to ships navigating around the yawning channel. On the Wirral side of the river, in dizzying perspective, was Ellesmere Port, glinting, turned into the wind, and beyond it the crenellated horizon of Wales, the gateway to other worlds unto themselves. A steady parade of ships wreaked havoc with the ledgy mud banks, but periodic lulls in traffic, at hours the boys knew by heart, enabled them to scramble down the forbidding incline and swim in the icy, graphite water. Other times, they bypassed the river entirely en route to Tabletop Bridge, where, lying in wait like a “super spy,” they would pelt onrushing trains with turnips scavenged from an adjacent field. “This is where my love of country came from,” Paul later recalled. Too young to travel long distances by himself, he would retreat to a secluded glade of the woods, entertained by a local cricket ensemble while he read book after book—a practice he repeated often over the years, albeit in cushier environs.

  Even in Speke, where most families were blue-collar workers, parents chased the middle-class dream: that higher education would lead to advancement for their children. Jim and Mary were perhaps more aggressive than others in that regard. It became a passion for them, as they steered their sons toward the right venues. In addition to Stockton Wood Road Primary, not far from the house, Paul attended the Joseph Williams Primary School. Both were well regarded for their standards of academic achievement.

  Jim and Mary also challenged the boys in their own ways. Jim was an armchair philosopher who rattled on incessantly about conventional “principles” such as self-respect, perseverance, a relentless work ethic, fairness. “He was a great conversationalist, very opinionated, an impassioned talker,” says a nephew who recalled Jim’s ritual of “matching wits” with everyone—and Paul, especially—in an effort to provoke an animated discussion. He devoured the newspaper each day, which provided fresh fodder for his observations—as well as an onslaught of information for his sons. In the evenings, with logs crackling in the fireplace, Jim would settle comfortably into an armchair in the front parlor, fold back a section of the Liverpool Echo or the Express, and scrutinize the crossword puzzle, inviting the boys to “solve clues” for him while explaining the meaning of new and uncommon words. “He was very into crosswords,” Paul recalled. “ ‘Learn crosswords, they’re good for your word power.’… If you didn’t know what a word meant or how it was spelled, my dad would say, ‘Look it up.’ ” Mary read poetry to them and insisted that her sons cultivate an interest in books and ideas that would carry them far beyond the limitations of their parents. “Mary was very keen on the boys’ schooling—very keen,” says Dill Mohin. “She knew Paul was clever and pledged to facilitate that in any way she could. No lazy Scouse accent was permitted. To her credit, he spoke right up, articulately, without sounding precocious. The boys weren’t allowed to go out to play until they’d done their [homework],” which Mary inspected as scrupulously as she did their appearance.

  Despite the so-called model curriculum set by headmaster John Gore and his well-intentioned staff, Joseph Williams was a reflection of its constituency. Few students at the primary level went on to grammar school; most graduated to secondary modern schools, lingering there only until they were old enough to work. In Paul’s class, out of several hundred students only ninety chose to sit the eleven-plus exam—a test to determine whether or not a student was grammar-school caliber and eligible to work toward a General Certificate of Education—and only four, one of whom was Paul McCartney, received a passing grade. The divisiveness it caused was painful. Decades later, the effect of that exam was still fresh on Paul’s mind: “It was too big a cutoff. All your friends who didn’t make it weren’t your friends anymore.”

  The grammar school Paul entered in September 1953 was a shining exemplar of the British education system. Founded as “a gentleman’s school” in 1825, the Liverpool Institute was a state-endowed academic facility whose ethos was geared exclusively to funneling as many of its students as possible into Oxford and Cambridge. Its Prussian curriculum was modeled on a university-type education, with streams, forms, and majors designed to maximize individual scholarship. The masters wore gowns in deference to their first-class pedigrees; an astonishing twenty of the fifty-two faculty members had Oxbridge degrees. Outstanding students were chosen as prefects in their later years. Administrators reported on the progress of standouts to sharp-eyed university dons. The whole process at the “Inny,” as it was known, imitated a grand and long-standing intellectual tradition, and nothing defined it better than the august school motto: No nobis solum set toti mundo nati—You’re born not for yourself but for the whole world.

  On Monday, September 8, 1953, looking scrubbed, spruced, and more than the least bit intimidated, Paul, dressed in a navy blue blazer with a green badge over the heart, short gray trousers, a green-and-black-striped tie, and redoubtable dog’s-tongue cap, stumbled off the bus from Garston and walked up Mount Street and through the wrought-iron railing that delimited the yards behind the immense school building. Like most boys who crossed the threshold, he must have been swept with thoughts of smallness. The Inny was the largest building he’d ever entered, larger even than his mother’s hospital and almost as imposing as the mammoth Liverpool Cathedral, whose unfinished sandstone friezes loomed in eerie relief across the street. Nearly a thousand boys mingled in the lower yard, a sea of bodies, many of them seventeen or eighteen—grown men!—with serious features. “We were eleven,” says Colin Manley, who was in Paul’s class and later played guitar for the Remo Four. “They herded us into the auditorium, told us what forms we’d be split up into, what subjects we were to take, and what was expected of us. It was horrendous, really—overwhelming.”

  Paul, slightly awed by it all, drew languages as his area of concentration, which seemed well suited to a boy with an ear for cadences. He began in the French stream but went on to do modern languages. “The first year, I was pretty lost,” he recalls. “But by the second year, I was learning Latin, Spanish, and German. At age twelve, which wasn’t bad.” Although spelling wasn’t a strong suit, and math even less so, he developed a particular knack for grammar and English literature, thanks in no small part to the influence of Alan Durband. Durband, known as Dusty to friends and colleagues, was somewhat of a celebrity at the Liverpool Institute, having written a short script for the BBC that was aired as a popular “morning story” on the radio. A disciple of the great literary critic F. R. Leavis, Durband brought the old rooted classics to life, beginning with Chaucer, which Paul read in its original Middle English, then trawled through Shakespeare’s plays. He responded strongly to the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, but he especially loved the way Alan Durband pared the stories down to their most basic themes, exposing the simplicity of it all. Indeed, Paul’s grasp of Durband’s lessons would be showcased in those early Beatles lyrics, deconstructing adolescent sexuality into pure sentiment (if not mere cliché): she loves you, I want to hold your hand, do you want to know a secret—small signs that what lay beyond might offer something more conceptual.

  Fascinating as literature was, Paul found his firmest expression in art. “He had a real talent when it came to drawing,” remembers Don Andrew, another future Remo Four member, who sat next to Paul in class. “It wasn’t something he learned from a book, he was self-taught, and so the work he produced was truly imaginative.” Paul had drawn for as long as he could remember; he was “always sketching.” Come vacat
ion time, he recalls, “I always [made] my own Christmas cards,” decorating them with nervous pencil sketches overlaid with watercolor washes.

  Many years later he would linger in a Long Island barn and watch his friend Willem de Kooning “work on these massive, great canvases” that fed Paul’s own hunger to paint, but there was no such encouragement from the masters. At the institute, students never “stayed with art” throughout their school career; the meat-and-potatoes classes were so demanding that there just wasn’t enough time for it. But those boys who showed talent were given the opportunity to “stay behind on a Tuesday night” for extra art instruction. Once a week Stan Reed, the institute’s resident draftsman, conducted lessons in line and perspective drawing, as well as watercolors for a class of ten or twelve self-motivated students. Paul, who had energy, albeit conventional talent, flourished under Reed’s practical guidance. What’s more, Reed helped Paul overcome the insecurity he had in relation to “true” artistes at the art college next door—abnegating the notion “that they paint, and we don’t.” Paul took full advantage of the advice—so much so that, in time, some students actually approached him for tips and technical hints. Says Don Andrew: “I remember walking along the art room on Parents Nights, when our work was hung, and being drawn to the most outstanding piece on exhibit. It was always Paul McCartney’s—he was that good.”

  But art wasn’t the anchor of a grammar-school education, not at the Liverpool Institute. Paul described his performance as “reasonably academic,” but the masters were anything but reasonable, especially not about his grades, which fell consistently—and sharply—toward the end of his third year. He knew the score: only true scholars gained admittance to university, and Paul wasn’t performing to those standards. Not that it would have mattered all that much. By then, there were too many distractions, and nothing in school could compete with a force as great as rock ’n roll.

  [III]

  There was always some vagrant rumble of music in the McCartney house, be it from the radio, which provided a constant source of entertainment; Jim’s stash of scratchy 78s, which contained an assortment of family favorites; or his repertoire of “party pieces” played to exhaustion on the piano with unflagging exuberance. Jim “had a lot of music in him,” Paul was to say, and throughout this period he took great care to convey its pleasures to the boys. Paul had been raised on an elementary mix of pop music—his father’s music hall standards, or what Paul referred to as “sing-along stuff,” plus highlights of the big band era coupled with the dreary mainstream hits of the day, such as “Greensleeves” and “Let Me Go Lover.” Aside from that fare and show tunes, there was little else that engaged him. Before 1955, if Paul wanted to hear live music, he accompanied Jim to the brass band concerts in Sefton Park, where he felt “very northern” settled on a bench, as he was, among an immense sweep of bedrock Liverpudlians, people rooted to the glorious past and proud to celebrate it in deference to the future. He had little if any sense of diversity or abundance. Music in general, to Paul, existed solely as entertainment, to be appreciated secondhand.

  During Paul’s early teenage years, Jim began to concentrate more on fine-tuning his sons’ inner ear, identifying instruments whenever a record was played and talking in elaborate detail about chord patterns and the architecture of harmony. Piano lessons were encouraged as a matter of course; Jim knew it would give Paul the right foundation should he ever wish to play in a band. But though Jim’s intentions were good, his timing was god-awful. “We made the mistake of starting [the lessons] in the summer,” he soon realized, “… and all the kids would be knocking at the door all the time, wanting [the boys] to come out and play.” Concentration was next to impossible; Paul had no discipline whatsoever, and when he struggled to practice the scales—or develop greater interest, for that matter—the lessons were dropped without fanfare.

  On Paul’s fourteenth birthday, Jim presented his son with a nickel-plated trumpet that had belonged to his cousin Ian Harris. There was more than a bit of family ritual in the passing of the horn. The trumpet was a real jazz musician’s instrument, the choice of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy Gillespie. It didn’t take a great ear to know that Paul McCartney wasn’t cut from the same cloth. Though he couldn’t articulate very well, he made up for it by blowing with great enthusiasm, learning how to make a big noise just by running the valves. But in truth, he had no range, no chops. He could blow his nose with more conviction.

  Once again, Paul had his priorities elsewhere. Among his mounting distractions at the time was Radio Luxembourg’s nighttime broadcast of American music, which he listened to in bed via an extension-cord-and-headphone device that Jim had hooked up to the radiogram in the living room. Paul considered it “a revelation,” and in his enthusiasm he began to mimic the voices that wailed aross the airwaves. Whereas he’d taken only an occasional whiff of big band crooners, he inhaled the gut-wrenching rock ’n roll singers. The raw, raunchy and often ferocious intensity of Ray Charles, Ivory Joe Hunter, Hank Ballard, and Fats Domino riveted Paul; they were capable of anything, from lusty, menacing growls to lilting falsettos. Some vocal styles, like the freakish bump-and-grind vamping of Bo Diddley, were undoubtedly puzzling, while Little Richard’s explosiveness and extraordinary range would ultimately feed Paul throughout his career.

  Of course, Paul’s itch to sing like these recording artists was next to impossible with a trumpet—the same dilemma John Lennon had faced with the harmonica. Fruitlessly, Paul pleaded with Jim to buy him a guitar. Whether money factored into the refusal that was given, it was certainly an issue for Jim; he couldn’t afford to blow almost three weeks’ salary on such an extravagance, especially since Paul already had a perfectly good instrument. After some wheel-spinning, Paul cleverly restructured his proposal: since the trumpet had no appeal, he sought permission to trade it for a more desirable instrument. Jim, sensing the futility of his position, finally gave in. Sometime about the end of June, just before school let out for vacation, Paul wrapped his trumpet in a cloth and took it to Rushworth and Dreaper, one of Liverpool’s leading music stores, where he exchanged it for a crudely made Zenith guitar—a henna-brown sunburst model, with f-holes, a cutaway tuning head, and action as high as a diving board—that was propped against one of the shelves. The salesman at Rushworth’s must have struggled to conceal his delight at the deal; it wasn’t every day he came by a trumpet worth five or six times the price of the £15 guitar. All the same, he had no idea how pivotal that transaction would be.

  [IV]

  Throughout the sweltering summer months of 1956, Paul remained cloistered indoors, the guitar monopolizing his attention in ways that made him seem preoccupied, if not obsessed. “The minute he got the guitar that was the end,” his brother, Michael, told a writer in 1967. “He was lost. He didn’t have time to eat or think about anything else.” The lifelong romance had begun, but from the outset there were mechanical problems that tested his devotion. For instance, he struggled almost perversely to make right-handed chord patterns conform to his stubborn left-handed perspective. It was no easy feat; whatever natural instinct he relied on proved maddeningly ineffective. And he had no simple answer for it. Years before, Paul’s cousin Bett Robbins, who babysat him and was also left-handed, had tried teaching him chords on her ukulele. It seemed manageable at the time; he would “have a little go” and accompany himself to a medley of wide-eyed children’s songs. But a full-size guitar presented full-size problems. In most cases, a lefty would chord it as if he were right-handed or simply turn the guitar around so that the fingers were reversed. Neither method, however, met with any success. It intruded on his rhythm, his arm sawing the air clumsily in stiff, erratic curves, tripping his timing like a broken switch. At times, such lack of control felt like a physical disability. And yet, it wasn’t for lack of coordination; Paul had a gift for the considerable complexities that went into making music. But like an American’s spastic attempt to shift and clutch a British car
, he simply couldn’t discipline his hands to make the necessary moves.

  Yet he would not give up. Discipline had never been Paul’s strong suit, but this was something more. This was desire—and an inflexible determination. Ingeniously, Paul turned to the hardware, as opposed to merely technique, and restrung the guitar in reverse so that the thinnest, high-pitched strings were now in the bass-notes position, and vice versa. The solution was jerry-rigged and “all rather inexact,” in his appraisal, but served to give him the control necessary to synchronize the rhythm with the mechanics. Voilà! That got him up and running almost immediately. “I learned some chords my way up,” he recalled, “A, D, and E—which was all you needed in those days.”

  The change it caused was stunning. Since entering Liverpool Institute, Paul had been focused almost intransigently on classwork, competing con brio against students in the upper streams, with the intention that one day he would return to his alma mater, awash in prestigious degrees, and teach alongside his tweedy mentors. But now only the guitar mattered, “and so the academic things were forgotten,” as Paul remembered.

  Mary tried to stay after him as best she could, her ultimate goal being to groom Paul for medical school. But while Mary spared no effort to further Paul’s future, her own was on the verge of unraveling. “Physically, she wasn’t able to handle the load,” says Dill Mohin, citing the rigors of yet another residential move designed to march the McCartneys progressively up the food chain.

  This time, Mary wrangled a council house on Forthlin Road in the suburb of Allerton, not far from their previous home but as different from Speke as go-karts are from Cadillacs. Founded as a manor settlement “for families of above-modest means,” Allerton had become an oasis of upward mobility on the clover-groomed pastures of South Liverpool. “I always thought of the area as being slightly posh,” says a friend who visited the McCartneys often at 20 Forthlin Road. Built in the 1920s, the quaint three-bedroom cottage in the middle of a terrace row reminded people of a gingerbread house, with its stubby picture window, smokestack chimney, and high-crowned brick facade the color of gravy. Slate-roof effects had been skillfully mimicked in asphalt. A lavender hedge squatted at the bend in a narrow walk. By the time the McCartneys took over the house, in late 1955, a garden budded nicely in the front courtyard. And best of all was the price: an affordable £1 6s. a week, thanks to Mary’s seniority at work.