The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  And while part of that dream would be fulfilled in spades, it would be about as far from the halls of ivy as a boy could reasonably stray.

  [II]

  Within weeks of entering the Liverpool Institute, George Harrison altered the course of his trajectory—not prudently and gradually but recklessly and radically—in ways that no one could have predicted. He was marked for trouble from the start. Uncooperative, indifferent, and unmotivated in class, conspicuously immature, stubborn to the point of rebelliousness, he was adrift in a school that stressed discipline and conformity. Under guidelines that applied to all institute boys, students were required to wear black blazers, a gray or white shirt with a green-striped tie, a badge, cap, gray trousers, and black shoes. George, already testing authority, wore tight-fitting checkered shirts, inverting the tie with the wide band tucked away so that only the narrow flap hung down, black drainpipes, and—somewhat prophetically—blue suede shoes. His hair, which had grown extravagantly long—long enough for his father to label him “a refugee from a Tarzan picture”—was plastered back in a quiff with palmfuls of gel to make it behave, topped with sugar water so that it would dry like Sheetrock. Everything he did seemed calculated to attract attention. “Basically, George and I were a couple of outcasts,” Arthur Kelly says. Sometimes he and Kelly simply stayed away altogether, “sagging off” school to smoke cigarettes and eat chips in a nearby cinema called the Tattler that played an endless reel of cartoons.

  Eventually, they’d be hauled before Headmaster Edwards, a humorless, ruddy-faced martinet who would mete out an appropriate punishment. But oddly, none was forthcoming. What seems most probable is that the school chose not to expend the energy on such hopeless cases as these lads. Later, misplaced feelings of anger and persecution arose—George railed against “being dictated to” by authority figures and blamed “schizophrenic jerk[s], just out of teachers training college” for failing to stimulate his interest—but in retrospect, Kelly realizes they’d brought it on themselves. No doubt they could have found a way, like other lackadaisical classmates, to balance outside interests with a regimen of studies. But Kelly says they fell victim to extenuating circumstances: “From about the age of thirteen, all we were interested in was rock ’n roll.”

  Music in some form had always filled the Harrison residence. Louise loved to sing, to put it mildly. Her voice wasn’t particularly melodious, but it was strong and vibrant, and her enthusiasm was infectious, even if it occasionally “shocked” a visitor, who recalls its “window-rattling” effect. Far be it from Harry to discourage her: when he was at sea, Harry had always brought presents for her, and one day in 1932 he arrived home with a splendid rosewood gramophone he’d picked up in the States. From that day on, “loads and loads of records”—those bulky 78 rpm “discs,” as they were called, made of shellac and as fragile as an old dinner plate—blared at all hours in the parlor. Ted Heath and Hoagy Carmichael were featured regularly, but Louise’s favorite was Victor Sylvester, whose big band swung with the intensity of a jungle telegraph. They had a radio, too, which Louise kept tuned to the BBC frequency, where every night, precisely at 8:10, the resident orchestra performed a tight medley of standards. Louise and Harry never missed that show. And no doubt it had a lasting effect on George, in the same way the Sunday-morning broadcast from Radio India, with its jangly sitar ragas, crept into his psyche.

  As seems to be the pattern with Liverpool boys, George first connected with the ubiquitous Lonnie Donegan. That locomotive voice and the simplicity of skiffle “just seemed made for me,” he told a biographer, recalling his earliest musical influence, along with Josh White and Hoagy Carmichael. Sitting in the front mezzanine of the Liverpool Empire, next to his brother Harold’s girlfriend (and eventual wife), Irene, he stared transfixed at the Great One, who played a concert there in the fall of 1956. One can only imagine the impression it made on George. Later, fanzine writers would insist that he sat through all four of Donegan’s performances, going so far as to roust the singer from his bedside and demand an autograph, but that appears to be myth. Whatever the extent of George’s intentness, there remains little question of his fascination and the explosion it would touch off within him.

  Not long thereafter, he bought a copy of “Rock Island Line” and invited Arthur Kelly to his house to hear it. “By the end of that afternoon, we said [to each other], ‘Let’s get guitars.’ ” George appealed to his mother, who was all for it. On this rare occasion, he had done his homework: an old Dovedale schoolmate, Raymond Hughes, was selling a three-quarter-size Egmond guitar, “a crappy old piece of junk,” for the unlikely price of £3 10s., and he knew that Louise, a notoriously easy touch, had a reserve stash that would cover it. Arthur Kelly, whose family wasn’t any better off than George’s, talked his parents into spending the extravagant sum of £15 on a lovely lacquered studio model, with an arched top, scratch plate, and racy f-holes. Two days later, in a picture taken against the house in the Harrisons’ backyard, both boys strike an age-old stance, with guitars cradled lovingly in their arms, listing slightly to the left. George is laying down an arthritic-looking C chord—one finger at a time, positioning each one precisely, the way a crane operator might plant steel girders at a construction site. His body is arched in concentration, joints and muscle taut as rubber bands. A checkered shirt is open at the collar, black jeans cinched high around his waist; otherwise, his clothes don’t give an inch—they look as snug and awkward as the guitars. But his face, knit studiously in thought, conveys utter confidence.

  In fact, frustrated with his inability to immediately conquer the guitar, he “put it away in the cupboard” for several months, ignoring it like another grammar-school textbook. It took a sharp nudge from overseas to jump-start his enthusiasm. Arthur Kelly’s brother-in-law Red, who had been stationed in New York on business, brought home “armfuls of presents” for Kelly’s sister upon his return. For Arthur, the crux of his largesse was records—not the brittle 78s, which were bountiful in Liverpool, but crystal-clear, durable 33s and 45s, virtual novelties in England, which to Kelly’s young ears “sounded astounding.” Most were by established crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Jackie Gleason, but among them was an EP by the curiously named Elvis Presley.

  “The first track was ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ ” Kelly says, recalling Elvis’s cover version, “and before it was over I had George on the phone.”

  Elvis appealed to everything smoldering in George—his ambivalence, his restlessness, and the rut of inertia from which there seemed no relief. The shock of Elvis Presley threw it all into gear: his voice juiced the circuits; the arrangements drove his imagination wild. Suddenly, everything vague and numbing now had some relevance. George recovered his guitar from the cupboard and, with Kelly as his enthusiastic accomplice, began an odyssey that would surpass not only Elvis but all of his dreams.

  Egged on by Kelly, George sought out someone, anyone, who could help crack the mysteries of Elvis. Their handpicked guru was “a bloke who lived round the corner” from Arthur and played the electric guitar at a local pub called the Cat. His name is lost to history; nevertheless, his role remains significant. For the princely sum of half a crown each, the man agreed—was delighted, in fact—to give George and Arthur lessons once a week, in a room directly above the pub. “He taught us a few basic root chords straightaway,” Kelly recalls. “The first number we learned was ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’ by Hank Williams. We hated the song but were thrilled, at least, to be changing from C to F to G7.”

  Soon enough, George and Arthur formed a skiffle band, the Rebels, whose name they’d “nicked off an American group.”* Like most skiffle bands, it was strictly a paste-up affair—a few songs, a few chords, a few laughs. Rehearsals, for want of a better word for them, were organized in George’s bedroom on Saturday mornings. “We made a tea-chest bass for Pete [Harrison] to play,” Kelly says of the old washtub decorated with gnomes that was co-opted from Louise’s closet, “but it didn’t change the
fact that we were awful.”

  Somehow—although no one recalls the specifics—the Rebels landed an actual gig at the local British Legion outpost, for an audience of dozy ex-servicemen. They played four or five songs, including “Cumberland Gap,” their showstopper, which did exactly as was intended. “We didn’t go down too well with the old punters,” recalls Kelly, who, like George, was relieved when the Rebels were replaced by a magician and treated to a pint of beer as payment in full for their services. Thus ended the Rebels’ illustrious, short-lived career. By now, rock ’n roll had captured George’s imagination, and he threw skiffle into the rubbish bin and himself into rock with the furious energy of someone trying to escape a terrible trap. It is no coincidence that his Radio Luxembourg favorites were the exact lineup of flamethrowers that captivated John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with the exception that George was also drawn to guitarists such as Chet Atkins and Carl Perkins, whose twangy riffs were the bedrock of rock ’n roll tradition. He paid a lot of attention to their vivid nuances, the phrasing and shading that made songs so immediately recognizable.

  Restlessly, George plotted to get his hands on those records so he could learn how to play them. A part-time job as a butcher’s delivery boy gave him enough pocket money to purchase the occasional 78 at Nuttle’s, a nearby little electrical shop with a rack of records on the back wall, but to George’s dismay their selection was pitifully small and blindingly white; the Everly Brothers, Elvis, and Bill Haley were all well stocked, but requests for Fats Domino and Ray Charles drew a blank stare. Other sources were desperately sought. One was Tony Bramwell, a lad who lived around the corner from George. Their encounters were anything but intimate. “Although George delivered meat to our house on his bicycle, I didn’t really know him,” Bramwell admits. “But I discovered, sometime later, that he was getting all my records from a classmate named Maurice Daniels, who was a drummer in a dance band and had borrowed them from me to rehearse with each week.”

  Before Brian Epstein transformed NEMS into music’s mecca on the Mersey, Lewis’s department store attracted all the traffic. George and Arthur were regulars at Lewis’s, but not to buy records—to steal them. “I had what was called a wanker’s mac,” Kelly says, “a straight raincoat, allowing you to get into it through an inside pocket, and which also gave you access to your trousers.” In those days, Lewis’s stacked 45s on the front counter, out of the path of serious audiophiles who scorned the teenagers. “We’d stand there, and I’d start flipping through the stack, with George looking over my shoulder. When I came to a great record, I’d put it at the front [of the stack] and then lean over slightly, continuing to browse, so that George could put his hand through my raincoat, take the 45, and slip it into my pants.” Kelly maintains they never shoplifted more than one or two records at a time, but over the course of several months the stash grew into a tidy little resource.

  Says Colin Manley, who with George was considered the best guitar player at the Liverpool Institute: “He knew how to color a riff, which none of us even considered trying [to do] before. It was so different, so inventive—and serious. It’s difficult to understand how unusual that was at the time. Most of us wanted to just play that damn instrument, but George was out to conquer it.” His success as a guitarist, Manley says, was due to hours of painstaking, monotonous practice bent over the frets. “He used to come over to my house, put a record on, and we’d play a passage over and over again until we’d mastered it, wrecking my [record player] needle in the process. Another time we tried to analyze Chet Atkins’s guitar playing. For hours, we sat together listening to his composition, ‘Trambone,’ on one of my Duane Eddy records. Later on, we learned ‘The Third Man Theme’ together and the [song] where he plays two separate tunes [simultaneously]. George studied guitar the way someone else would a scientific theory. And it challenged him in the same way. Whatever came later on was a direct result of his commitment to, and his preoccupation with, the guitar.”

  [III]

  By the time he was fourteen, George’s grades had plunged toward abysmal depths. He’d stopped studying altogether and concentrated solely on playing music. Only occasionally did he put in an appearance at school, and when he showed up at all, trouble followed. It came as a blessing when students got a break and rushed outside to unwind. On cue, George always made a beeline for the Smokers Corner, a well-worn patch of tundra invisible to the hawkeyed prefects, dressed in gowns with green silk braids, who patrolled the grounds like rottweilers. About ten boys, among them the institute’s sorriest band of outcasts (including future Beatles road manager, Neil Aspinall), would congregate behind a brick shack where the gear for the school’s Combined Cadet Force unit was kept. They’d light up contraband cigarettes and vent their collective scorn, ridiculing the platoon of uniformed students “square-bashing” about the schoolyard. Conformity offended them almost as much as the swots, or grinds, scattered around the yard on benches, grinding for an exam.

  That outlook proved dicey for one of the Smokers Corner regulars. Paul McCartney considered himself a fellow traveler, a denizen of the outlaw fringe, and yet he moved so sure-footedly on the academic track. An all-out Elvis fan, Paul wore skintight pants, much like George, and combed his lovely black hair into a quiff. And although he spoke posh to a degree, his remarks were salted liberally with profanity. He was, in some ways, a bit of a double agent.

  Over the years, that was to be Paul’s gift. It would be easy to dismiss him as a dandy-faced naïf, but he was at the same time exceedingly shrewd. Innocent though he might look with his guileless expression and puppy-dog eyes, his lips rounded like those of an angelic choirboy, he was no angel. Not only had he won the confidence of a character like John Lennon, in the end he would outplay him.

  As George recounted, “I’d met Paul on the bus, coming back from school.” Paul shared George’s interest in refining mechanics and technique, and the two spent afternoons practicing. But while George grappled almost entirely with execution, Paul provided interpretation. His approach was more intuitive; he could seize a few bars of music and, with a flick of the wrist or sudden burst of energy, make it his own.

  Precision and expression: between them, George and Paul had hit upon the elements that distinguished their future collaboration. But almost as critical was the friendship developing between the two boys. Most institute upperclassmen never mixed with younger students, but for George, with his interest in rock ’n roll and undeniable talent, Paul felt the affection of an elder brother. He was touched by something he saw in the gangly boy. They hung around together on the weekends. He watched over George in school—Paul an effusively outgoing bloke, and George, barely fourteen and slow-talking, nipping alongside like a fawn; at lunch, Paul doled out double helpings from his outpost behind the cafeteria line; he rode the bus home with George to Allerton and dragged him along on a couple of social outings. But friends though they were, Paul had kept his business with the Quarry Men quite separate. George heard only passing remarks about the band, inasmuch as their exploits made news around school.

  Toward the beginning of February, Paul mentioned to his protégé that he might want to check out the Quarry Men at a Wilson Hall gig they were playing on February 6 in Garston. It is not entirely clear how that unfolded. There are countless eyewitness versions of the historic meeting, many of which are suffused with the myopia of hindsight and self-serving glory. Everyone agrees that George turned up at Garston that night. He had traveled alone through the gray February landscape, taking the no. 66 bus from Speke. When he arrived at Wilson Hall, the dance was already in progress, and he watched the Quarry Men’s raucous set from the sidelines with envy and admiration. The so-called official version of the meeting is that, afterward, George auditioned for John and the others in the tiny bandroom behind the stage, although the likelihood of that is remote. “Charlie McBain wouldn’t have permitted it,” says Colin Hanton of their persnickety employer. “He always had a six-to-eight-piece band onstage, and you weren’t
allowed to make a peep in the bandroom.”

  In fact, it wasn’t until a month later, on March 12, that George Harrison lit the fuse that eventually shot him into orbit. At Paul’s urging, he arranged to meet the band at the opening of a dingy unlicensed skiffle cellar in West Oakhill Park, which wasn’t too far from city center. The Morgue, as it was aptly called, was the brainchild of a teenager teeming with outrageous theatrical flair named Alan Caldwell, who soon would change his name to Rory Storm. Caldwell raised enough money to rent the damp basement of a ramshackle Victorian house from his friend Marjorie Thompson’s mother. “It was a dump, the pits,” Colin Hanton recalls, “two pitch-black rooms, joined by a long corridor, with one blue bulb in the far corner.” Ultraviolet skeletons had been painted on the walls as the sole concession to decoration; a wall fan pumped enough fresh air inside to keep patrons from passing out. You had to be at least fifteen years old. And in the absence of an admission charge, it was mandatory to purchase a bottle of orange juice or a Coke, which just about covered expenses.

  George was friendly with Caldwell’s thirteen-year-old sister, Iris, who was one of the prettiest girls in Liverpool. In fact, two weeks later, following a cruel prank that involved Caldwell announcing over the P.A. how his flat-chested sister secretly stuffed socks into her training bra, George chased the heartbroken girl down the street and gave her what amounted to first kisses for both youngsters. On opening night Iris was at her post, manning the club’s makeshift cloakroom, and she waved shyly as he entered, carrying a beat-up guitar.