The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  During their sessions, Paul shared with John the jewels from his “very diverse little record collection” and pointed him toward singers such as the Coasters and Larry Williams, the hard-pounding session piano player for Specialty Records, who may not “have [had] quite as an identifiable voice as [Little] Richard” but could rip off gems like “Short Fat Fanny” or “Bony Maronie” with the same manic pitch. John hooked right in and fed off the energy. He and Paul had remarkably similar tastes; they liked it fast, hard, and loose. Black music hit them both the same way, too, especially the wild-sounding, primitive stuff, with lyrics that crackled with innuendo: Bo Diddley, Lloyd Price, and Big Joe Turner made an impression. Later, as the Beatles, they would roll all of it into their presentation, riffing on Chuck Berry, the Miracles, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis—so many of the early innovators. But for now, they were just trying to take it all in.

  A rhythm developed between John and Paul that got stronger and tighter. Mostly it was intuitive, unspoken. They understood each other. There were unknowns but no mysteries. “They were on the same indefinite path,” says Eric Griffiths, who sensed that their bonding signaled his undoing. “Once they got together, things became serious—and fast. The band was supposed to be a laugh; now they devoted all their attention to it and in a more committed way than any of us really intended.” Other Quarry Men also recognized their special rapport. In Colin Hanton’s estimation: “The band quickly became John and Paul. It was always John and Paul, Paul and John. Even when someone didn’t turn up to rehearse, John and Paul would be at it, harmonizing or arranging material, practicing, either at Auntie Mimi’s or at Paul’s house.”

  No doubt about it, they were tuned to the same groove. But aside from a musical passion and amiability, they filled enormous gaps in each other’s lives. Where John was impatient and careless, Paul was a perfectionist—or, at least, appeared to be—in his methodical approach to music and the way he dealt with the world. Where John was moody and aloof, Paul was blithe and outgoing, gregarious, and irrepressibly cheerful. Where John was straightforward if brutally frank, Paul practiced diplomacy to manipulate a situation. Where John had attitude, Paul’s artistic nature was a work in progress. Where John’s upbringing was comfortably middle-class (according to musician Howie Casey, “the only claim he had to being a working-class hero was on sheet music”), Paul was truly blue-collar. Where John was struggling to become a musician, Paul seemed born to it.

  And John gave Paul someone to look up to. Their age difference and the fact that John was in art college—a man of the world!—made John “a particularly attractive character” in Paul’s eyes. There was a feral force in his manner, a sense of “fuck it all” that emanated great strength. He had a style of arrogance that dazed people and started things in motion. And he scorned any sign of fear. John’s response to any tentativeness was a sneer, a sneer with humbling consequences.

  John occasionally felt the need to reinforce his dominance, but he never required that Paul cede his individuality. He gave the younger boy plenty of room in which to leave his imprint. The Quarry Men would try a new song, and John would immediately seek Paul’s opinion. He’d allow Paul to change keys to suit his register, propose certain variations, reconfigure arrangements. “After a while, they’d finish each other’s sentences,” Eric Griffiths says. “That’s when we knew how strong their friendship had become. They’d grown that dependent on one another.”

  Dependent—and unified. They consolidated their individual strengths into a productive collaboration and grew resentful of those who questioned it. Thereafter, it was John and Paul who brought in all the new material; they assigned each musician his part, chose the songs, sequenced the sets—they literally dictated how rehearsals went down. “The rest of us hadn’t a clue as far as arrangements went,” Hanton says slowly. “And they seemed to have everything right there, at their fingertips, which was all right by me, because their ideas were good and I enjoyed playing with them.” But the two could be unforgiving and relentless. “Say the wrong thing, contradict them, and you were frozen out. A look would pass between them, and afterwards it was as if you didn’t exist.”

  Even in social situations, the Lennon-McCartney bond seemed well defined. The unlikely pair spent many evenings together browsing through the record stacks in the basement of NEMS, hunting for new releases that captured the aggressiveness, the intensity, and the physical tug about which they debated talmudically afterward over coffee. Occasionally, John invited Paul and his girlfriend, a Welsh nurse named Rhiannon, to double-date.

  To John’s further delight, he discovered that Paul was corruptible. In no time, he groomed his young cohort to shoplift cigarettes and candy, as well as stimulating in him an appetite for pranks. On one occasion that still resonates for those involved, the Quarry Men went to a party in Ford, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool, out past the Aintree Racecourse. “John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins,” says Charles Roberts, who met them en route on the upper deck of a cherry red Ripple bus. “It was like the rest of us didn’t exist.” They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner, Roberts recalls. And it wasn’t just music on their agenda, but mischief. “In the middle of the party they went out, ostensibly looking for a cigarette machine, and appeared some time later carrying a cocky-watchman’s lamp.* The next morning, when it was time to leave, we couldn’t get out of the house because [they] had put cement stolen from the roadworks into the mortise lock so the front door wouldn’t open. And we had to escape through a window.”

  Through the rest of the year and into the brutal cold spell that blighted early February—every day that winter seemed more blustery than the last—the two boys reinforced the parameters of their friendship. After-school hours were set aside for practice and rehearsal, with weekends devoted to parties and the random gig. It left little time for studies, but then neither boy was academically motivated anyway.

  Paul especially began to distinguish himself on guitar. He had a real feel for the instrument, not just for strumming it but for subtle nuances like vamping on the strings with the heel of his hand to create an organic chukka-chukka rhythm—inspired by listening to those high-voltage Eddie Cochran records—and accenting chords with single bass notes inserted between changes to create the kind of dramatic phrasing that became synonymous with the distinctive, undulating bass lines in his later work. John’s technique was more spontaneous, more relaxed. “He had a way of just banging out a few chords and making it sound cool,” observes one of the Woolton gang. “Any song, no matter if he knew it or not—John would barrel right through it.” Notes mattered less to him than feel, structure less than sound. Paul’s precise efforts, on the other hand, provided a measure of syntax and kept songs from sounding too slapped together.

  Sometime in late February, Paul went back to picking out the fairly uncomplicated instrumental “Raunchy,” playing the melody line over and over until it was nearly note-perfect. The song, by Sun Records A&R man Bill Justis, had been one of the first pop instrumentals to smash through the Top Ten that year, and its repetitive but catchy guitar lick, supporting what was basically an alto sax showcase, made it instantly familiar—and danceable. It seemed like a natural addition to the Quarry Men’s repertoire. Paul had been looking for another solo spot to redeem his fumbled debut, but there was more to it than self-esteem. He had heard another boy play it, a fifteen-year-old schoolmate whom he had befriended two years earlier, and he wanted to master it first, to maintain their friendly rivalry. He almost had it down—almost. But it wasn’t quite there yet.

  And not until it was dead-on would he play it for George Harrison.

  Chapter 6 The Missing Links

  [I]

  Even before he met Paul McCartney, George Harrison had demonstrated that he was not to be outperformed when it came to the guitar.

  One day when he was just thirteen years old, George and his best friend, Arthur Kelly, were
practicing a version of “Last Train to San Fernando,” a skiffle hit they’d learned from listening to a record, “just horsing around with it” up in George’s bedroom, when a defining incident occurred. Because they’d only recently taken up the guitar together and had progressed at the same limping speed, Kelly says, “we could barely switch chords, let alone do anything fancy.” But when they got to the middle part, where the instrumentation that filled a few bars normally eluded these novices, George lit into it as if he were Denny Wright, the riff’s nimble author. “Off he goes!” Kelly remembers, feeling utterly astonished—and dazzled—as his friend galloped through the break. “We’d only heard the song two or three times, but George had somehow memorized it. He just inhaled those notes and played them back perfectly, at the same speed as on the record.” He wasn’t showing off; that wasn’t George’s style. “But from that day on,” Kelly says, “I basically played rhythm and just followed George’s lead.”

  The lead: it was an unusual role for a boy who was as unsuited to command as he was, later on, to celebrity. As a teenager, the slight, spindly George Harrison was an eerily detached, introspective boy with dark, expressive eyes, huge ears, and a mischievous smile that seized his whole face with a kind of wolfish delight. A quick grin, yes—and yet a sullen languor. Although he was by no means a loner, he was outwardly shy, and it was the kind of shyness so inhibiting that it was often misinterpreted as arrogance. He tended to disappear within himself, to give away as little as possible. Friends from the neighborhood were less eloquent, remembering him as someone who “blended in with the scenery.” George was “a quieter, more taciturn kind of guy” than other blokes, according to another acquaintance, “but he was pretty tough as well.” There was nothing in his development that remotely hinted at the witty, disarming Beatle whose spontaneous antics would transform press conferences into stand-up comedy.

  For a man later obsessed with his own spiritual essence, it is somewhat disconcerting that young George squandered adolescence as such a blank slate. Unlike Paul’s upbringing, the unworldly Harrison clan offered him little in the way of academic enrichment, nothing that would jump-start a young man’s imagination. Nor did they have the kind of elitist pretensions that Mimi harbored for John. In fact, the Harrisons remained strangely indifferent to the postwar opportunities around them. Like many of the hard-nosed port people who were resettled in suburban ghettos in the 1930s, they were content just to enjoy their upgraded lifestyle—not to “rock the boat,” in the wisdom of a Harrison family mantra—rather than to court intangibles and abstractions.

  Like Freddie Lennon, like so many Scousers, Harry Harrison’s inner compass was adjusted for water. He’d grown up around the Liverpool docks, enchanted by their gritty romance and faraway lure, and by seventeen he was already trolling the seas for the posh White Star Line, living rapturously between a series of exotic ports. But Harry’s sailing experience was doomed by emotional and financial strains. To begin with, a woman had sneaked through his defenses. He met Louise French in Liverpool one evening in 1929 while she was streaking through an alleyway en route to an engagement with another friend. A plain, assertive, but engaging shopgirl given to impulse, she gamely handed her address to Harry—a perfect stranger—following a brief encounter, convinced that a sailor putting out to Africa the next day posed no threat. But a continent’s separation couldn’t diminish Harry’s interest, and for months he inundated Louise with letters until she agreed to a proper date. He married her the next year, while on extended leave, and struggled to remain afloat—literally—for another six years. The birth of two children—named Louise and Harry, underscoring a lack of imagination—proved dispiriting to an adoring absentee father, who recognized that a sailor’s take-home of “twenty-five bob [shillings] a week” was inadequate to support them. Though he had no alternative plan, by 1936, intending to alter his destiny, Harry seemed ready to come ashore.

  Unfortunately, his timing couldn’t have been worse. Lancashire was plagued by an economic slump that had forced thousands of Liverpudlians to go on the dole. The widening tide of the Depression had engulfed the North. Overland work was scarce for a journeyman sailor, and Harry, who had no applicable skills aside from haircutting, which had been a hobby at sea, depended on charity to pull them through. The family moved into a modest terrace house in a South Liverpool area known as Wavertree. With Louise’s meager earnings as a grocer’s clerk and twenty-three shillings provided benevolently by the state, there was barely enough to cover expenses.

  It took almost two years of scraping by before Harry landed a job. He began working for the Liverpool Corporation, as a streetcar conductor on the Speke-Liverpool route, when an unexpected opening for a driver vaulted him into a permanent position. He loved bus driving from the first day he slipped behind the wheel, and in thirty-one years on the job, there was never a day in which he regarded it as anything but a sacred, businesslike obligation. That meant striking an uncharacteristic facade: his long putty face was always pleasant in private, but on the bus it was expressionless, grim, like a rock. Paul McCartney, a frequent passenger on Harry’s route, remembered “being a little disturbed about the hardness in his character,” considering a first-name familiarity with most of the passengers and the distant way in which he treated them.

  Within two years, Louise gave birth to another boy, Peter, and two years after that, on February 25, 1943, George Harold was born, completing the Harrison family portrait. George was an unnaturally beautiful child. Dark-haired and dark-eyed with skin like polished bone and a lean-jawed face that favored his father’s features, he quickly developed the kind of strong, intimate armor that inures the youngest sibling to getting constantly picked on.

  The Harrisons were a boisterous crew—good-natured boisterous. “They’d yell at each other and swear around the [dinner] table,” recalls Arthur Kelly. There was a good deal of taunting and ridiculing one another—none of which was levied with any unpleasantness. In fact, Kelly says he was envious of their noisy rapport, the earthy way they expressed their affections. “I enjoyed being there… because with all the uproar they were very much a family.”

  And very much in need. Harry’s civil-service job was as steady as a heartbeat, but money was always tight. As George later discovered, his father would never earn more than £10 a week driving a bus. In 1947, with four children to feed and clothe, there was never enough from his £6-a-week salary to provide simple luxuries like sugar and fresh fruit. Rationing put a further strain on their daily table. Even with Louise’s influence at the grocer’s, it was difficult enough to lay hands on butter and meat for six people without plying the black market, and that cost plenty—too much for the Harrisons. Although Harry’s “overtime money and… winnings from snooker tournements” helped some, it didn’t solve their pressing needs. They teetered precariously on the brink of debt—not crippling debt, but the kind of slow, agonizing squeeze that strangles the dreams and pleasures of poor, hardworking families. On top of everything else, they’d outgrown their accommodations; the tiny, unheated house in Wavertree was bursting at the seams, the toilet in the backyard an objectionable hazard.

  All that, however, was to change overnight. Incredibly, in 1949 the Harrison family fortunes took an unexpected twist: they hit the lottery. Well, not exactly the lottery, but nearly as good: after they had been languishing for eighteen years on what everyone assumed was just a fictitious waiting list, the Liverpool Corporation drew the Harrisons’ name from its deep well of housing applicants and moved them to 25 Upton Green, a spanking new council house located on an established parcel of the Speke estate, about half a mile from where Paul McCartney lived.

  Their good fortune “seemed fantastic” to six-year-old George, who, as the youngest family member, had always been last in line for everything. Living in Upton Green meant some space and a chance to develop his own identity. The house, though relatively small, was comfortable by council standards and offered a boy endless opportunities for exploration.
Its layout, unlike Wavertree, was circuitous, with a center hall that spilled into a front parlor and dining area without necessitating a detour through the kitchen, and four tiny upstairs bedrooms, including one all his own for George. There was even a garden in the front that opened onto a close, where he could ride his bicycle without having to dodge traffic. George couldn’t have been happier. Louise Harrison was less rhapsodic, dismissing the neighborhood impudently as “a slum-clearance area,” but her criticism was probably a reaction more to the melting pot of residents she encountered there—people with whom an Irish primitive like Louise had little familiarity—than to its aesthetics.

  Called Geo (pronounced Joe) by his family, George initially seemed poised for even greater upward mobility. His term at nearby Dovedale Primary, which John Lennon had also attended, was a small triumph. He was no scholar, but he was an apt pupil with good manners and passed the eleven-plus scholarship with a solid enough margin to assure himself a coveted place in one of Liverpool’s grammar schools. That was reason alone to celebrate in the Harrison family. Harry talked tirelessly about the importance of a good education and how hard work in school was the only way to escape a dreaded life of poverty and physical labor, how it would give one the chance to be somebody, a “blood,” perhaps (for bluebloods, as he called them), to achieve the security he’d always longed for. But none of George’s siblings had their heart set on university. Louise, though she brought home high marks, had no intention of going beyond high school. Harry Jr. and Peter were bright boys, but neither was a particularly good student; they’d gone straight into a trade. George, on the other hand, gave his father a glimmer of hope that at least one of his sons would go on to university and make something of himself.