Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  In 1956–7, when John was 16, he turned his gang into his group, the Quarry Men, and for a while they rode the skiffle craze, up on stage belting out rhythmic prison songs of the American South. John sang and played guitar, forever the front man. But he was—first, last, always—a rocker, and his group was now charging headlong in that direction; newspaper ads for the dances they played were already calling them Rock ’n’ Skiffle, though actually it was rock all the way. And later, when John—now 17 and clearly the coolest kid on the block—generously invited Paul to join them, the 15-year-old was so keen to make himself indispensable that deceiving Dad was but the flimsiest of obstacles.

  Paul was conscious of the age gap. To him, John was “the fairground hero, the big lad riding the dodgems,”1 a grown-up Teddy Boy who swore, smoked, scrapped, had sex, got drunk and went to college, who strutted around with Elvis Presley sideburns, upturned collar, hunched shoulders and an intimidating stare (which Paul would soon learn was born of insecurity and acute shortsightedness). Lennon radiated a life-force that turned heads everywhere: he was wickedly funny and fast with it, he was abrasive, incisive and devastatingly rude, and he was musical, literate and beguilingly creative. Whether painting, conceiving strangely comic poems, or committing cruel drawings and odd stories to the written page, he was a boy beyond convention and control, a lone ranger. He was everything his friends wanted to be, and said everything they wanted to say but wouldn’t dare. John Lennon always dared.

  He had long dispensed with one of the taboos of childhood, befriending whoever he liked even if they were younger. One of his closest pals, Ivan Vaughan, was born the same day as Paul McCartney in June 1942 (and Ivan had introduced them). Age didn’t matter to John if the friend brought something interesting to the table. If anyone had a problem with a 17-year-old college student hanging around with a 15-year-old schoolboy it was theirs alone to deal with, though if they chose to voice it near him they were risking a thump. As for Paul, at their first meeting six months earlier he’d felt too young to be John’s friend, the wrong side of “the cusp”; he’d impressed the hell out of him though, and now, invited in, he wasn’t going to let it slip. He would be—and was—sharp, sure and impressive enough to hold John’s attention.

  Paul had only recently sung in a church choir, arrived home wet from scout camp, and been allowed to wear long trousers to school—but, instantly, such things were history. From late 1957, he grew up fast. “Once I got to know John it all changed,” he’d recall a decade later. “I went off in a completely new direction.”2 Paul had much to offer, and John had seen it. He had a great musical talent, an instinctive and untutored gift; he played piano and was a confident and characteristic guitarist who always knew more chords than John and was much better at remembering words. At 13, before rock and roll changed his life, Paul composed two catchy piano tunes, dance-band numbers like those his dad had played around Liverpool ballrooms in the 1920s with his own Jim Mac’s Band. Then, when the guitar came along in 1957, Paul was hooked.

  He was also a funny storyteller and mimic, a cartoonist and able caricaturist. The eldest son of particular parents, Paul knew how to behave socially. John, who’d also been brought up well, bothered less with social niceties. Paul liked to create the best impression and say the right things, exuding a breezy confidence and wanting people to think highly of him. He was charming, sharp, mentally strong and rarely outmaneuvered. John saw it all and welcomed it: though he had to be dominant, he respected no one who didn’t stand up to him. Paul did, despite being twenty months his junior; but John also knew that if Paul ever challenged his natural supremacy, at least before he was ready to abdicate it, he’d see him off.

  The more hours John and Paul spent together the more they found these things out, uncovering humor and harmony right down the line. They’d both read Alice in Wonderland and Just William, though Paul had read Alice once or twice whereas John still feasted on it every few months and had folded Lewis Carroll’s vocabulary into his own. They also shared a strong interest in television, and knew BBC radio personalities and northern comedians, quoting current and vintage catchphrases. Both were consumed by The Goon Show and talked the talk familiar only to those who imbibed the lingo; they made each other laugh all the time and began to develop an attuned shorthand humor beyond others’ comprehension.

  Then there were girls. Paul, despite the age gap, matched John in his ceaseless lust; John was already a sexual adventurer, Paul wasn’t far behind. Both had shed their virginity and were eager for whatever action they could get. Bird-spotting was a way of life and often now a combined quest. They also shared the same goddesses, the fantasy figures who kept men awake at night in the late 1950s, women such as Anita Ekberg, Juliette Gréco and Brigitte Bardot. The Parisienne Bardot, an actress as well as a model, was the ultimate in pin-ups. When And God Created Woman and Mam’selle Striptease were in the local cinemas, Liverpool could have been powered on the heat generated in the stalls. John and Paul were there. On the ceiling above his bed, John had the original French poster of Et Dieu … Créa la femme, a drawing of the topless Bardot, long blonde hair cascading over ample breasts.

  But top of their hit parade, always, was American rock and roll music—hearing it and playing it. Two years earlier it wasn’t known to them, now it was what they lived and breathed for. There weren’t yet a hundred recordings to cherish but John and Paul knew them all, and when they weren’t listening to or playing them they were talking about them, thrilling to the minutiae. “Worshipping” is the word Paul has used.3 They both revered Little Richard, the dynamic singer from Macon, Georgia, who, according to the weekly British music papers, had just given it all up and disappeared into the Church. But they would always have “Long Tall Sally,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’ ” and “Lucille,” and John was floored by Paul’s uncanny ability to mimic that screaming and hollering voice. Everyone was amazed by it. Ian James, Paul’s best friend before John came along, says Paul would often break into it without warning, as if Little Richard was trapped inside him and occasionally had to surface for air.

  There were other heroes—Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis and more—but no one was ever greater, for either, than Elvis, who’d already cut the soundtrack of their youth. Elvis Presley was God, it was as simple as that. John and Paul listened to his records in the way only besotted fans do, catching and trying to analyze all the little inexplicable sounds, like the laugh he couldn’t stifle at the end of “Baby Let’s Play House” and the muttered asides at the end of “Hound Dog.”4

  Just recently, the Crickets had burst into their lives too, a breakthrough almost as essential. Under their leader Buddy Holly, the Crickets introduced the group sound: vocal, electric guitar, bass and drums. Three singles—“That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue” and “Oh Boy!”—had arrived in Britain at the perfect moment, their easy-to-play music encouraging thousands of bored skiffle groups to begin making the switch to pop and rock. It was the start of everything. John and Paul loved the Crickets (even the name had their regard) and were inspired to write songs in Buddy’s vocal and musical style. Toward the end of 1957, John wrote “Hello Little Girl” and Paul came up with “I Lost My Little Girl”; the similarity in their titles was apparently coincidental but both were steeped in the Crickets’ sound.

  John and Paul’s passion for rock and roll wedded them heart and soul, and Liverpool Corporation’s education committee also played a part. Unless the Quarry Men had a booking somewhere, Jim McCartney’s disapproval of John meant Paul couldn’t see his friend at night. They had to be more shrewd. Situated up the hill from the city center, Liverpool College of Art—where John, newly enrolled, was already proving himself a handful—happened to adjoin Liverpool Institute, Paul’s grammar school. The two buildings had been one, so with a quick dash through their respective exits John and Paul would arrive together on the same stretch of street at the same moment and were truants for the afternoon—“sagging off
.” John would have his guitar ready.

  From a stop on Catharine Street, they’d board the 86 bus, a green double-decker like those driven by Harry Harrison, father of Paul’s young schoolfriend George. They found their way upstairs and had a smoke, strumming strings while the bus bounced them out to the southern suburbs, along Upper Parliament Street—Toxteth, with its immigrant West Indian ghetto—past Sefton General Hospital to the roundabout at Penny Lane and then beyond to Allerton. Within thirty minutes of sneaking out, they’d be inside Paul’s terraced council house at 20 Forthlin Road, empty in the daytime. The McCartneys had only been here six months when Paul’s mother Mary died, and now Jim, 55, was trying to cope alone with their two teenage boys and maintain his wife’s high standards and principles. His brothers and sisters rallied round—they were a strong, close-knit family, the women big on motherly advice, the men strong on Liverpool wit and repartee, characters all. Paul’s Auntie Gin and Auntie Mill came over to clean, iron and cook for them on alternate Monday afternoons: Paul’s sessions with John were only possible Tuesdays to Fridays. There was the irony. It was only because Jim wanted Paul to stay away from the troublemaker Lennon that he was sagging off school, courting trouble like he’d never done before. (So it was “Dad’s fault.”)

  They’d go into what the McCartneys called the front parlor, a standard, basic 1950s front room: a sofa with antimacassars crocheted by Paul’s aunties, cotton covers hiding the broken springs of Jim’s armchair, a tiny black-and-white TV in the corner, a record player, a piano, and threadbare runners on the wooden floorboards that did for a carpet. John and Paul would sit opposite each other by the fireplace. As Paul was left-handed their guitars went the same way and each could enjoy the mirror effect of watching the other’s fingers shape the chords as if they were his own. Paul would later call these “eyeball to eyeball sessions,” and he’d be treated to something few witnessed: John put his glasses on. Only rarely did they leave his pocket, even though without them he could barely see a thing. Almost in each other’s face, John and Paul quickly gained an unusual closeness, little or nothing hidden. Paul noticed that “John had beautiful hands.”5

  Paul weaned John off the banjo chords taught him by his mother Julia. John had musical flair in his family line too, but it was more rough and ready than Paul’s: John could play banjo, guitar and harmonica, often more with aggression than precision. Afternoons were whiled away playing guitars to records, singing, reveling in the joy of chords, finding out how almost every rock song they knew could be played with C, F and G or G7. They laughed over a sticker visible through the soundhole of John’s guitar: GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT it said, and by ’eck it ’adn’t. They toiled hours, weeks, trying to work out how Buddy Holly played the intro to “That’ll Be the Day,” before John eventually figured it out, celebrating with a puff on Jim’s spare pipe. They’d no tobacco, but a quick raid on the tea caddy produced a few pinches of Twinings or Typhoo; the pipe passed between them, each pulling hard while agreeing on its terrible taste.

  Buddy Holly was the springboard to John and Paul’s songwriting. As John later said, “Practically every Buddy Holly song was three chords, so why not write your own?”6

  Stated so matter-of-factly, it could seem that writing songs was an obvious next move, but it wasn’t. Teenagers all over Britain liked Buddy Holly and rock and roll, but of that large number only a fraction picked up a guitar and tried playing it, and fewer still—in fact hardly anyone—used it as the inspiration to write songs themselves. John and Paul didn’t know anyone else who did it, no one from school or college, no relative or friend … and yet somehow, by nothing more than fate or fluke, they’d found each other, discovered they both wrote songs, and decided to try it together. Paul recalls the method: “We’d sit down and say, ‘OK, what are we going to do?’ and we’d just start off strumming and one or the other of us would kick off some kind of idea and then we’d just develop it and bounce off each other.”7

  It had taken only seconds to discover that both had strong and distinctive voices for rock—in all its styles and tempos—and that they sounded great together. They could blend in perfect harmony, with Paul tending to take the higher key and John holding the lower. The Crickets’ influence was again strong, and so too were the crafted melodic harmonies of the Everly Brothers, whose first record, “Bye Bye Love,” was issued in Britain the day before John met Paul, July 5, 1957. (Throughout this history, the timing of everything is always perfect.) Now, in the last week of January 1958, the bestselling chart produced by Liverpool’s newest record shop Nems—published in The Record Mirror the same day John and Paul led the Quarry Men through some rock ’n’ skiffle down the Cavern—had “Peggy Sue” by Buddy Holly at number 1, “Oh Boy!” by the Crickets at 2 and “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis at 3. Here was inspiration on a stick.

  Their first song was “Too Bad About Sorrows.” It was never properly recorded, possibly never completed, and John and Paul only ever let out the first couple of lines:

  Too bad about sorrows, too bad about love,

  There’ll be no tomorrow, for all of your life.8

  They sang the vocal in unison, as they did most of these songs.

  They called their second song “Just Fun.”

  They said our love was just fun / The day that our friendship begun.

  There’s no blue moon that I can see / There’s never been in history.

  They knew the final line was a stinker and left the song unfinished after failing to come up with anything better. Paul had a tendency to perfection but John was always restless to move on, keen to try something new.

  Another number seems to have been called “Because I Know You Love Me So.” The words were about someone who wakes up feeling blue because his lover doesn’t treat him right, but then reads her letters and finds she does care. It had appealing Holly-like changes and John and Paul sang it together in harmony like the Everlys, each encouraging good music from the other.9

  These were not songs they played with the Quarry Men. The group’s three other members (Eric, Len and Colin) never knew much about them: a rift had taken place, the front two getting together without their bandmates. Only certain people heard these new songs—select friends, Paul’s dad, brother and a few relatives. John may not have played them to anyone but Paul liked to demonstrate them, enjoying the resulting praise. Their harshest critics were always themselves. Paul has said that the two of them never reckoned any of these early songs, not even at the time; they knew they were unsophisticated, just a step.10 John in particular was never slow to say if something was “crap,” even if it was his own.

  John’s first two attempts at songwriting, a year earlier, had already vanished from his memory, never to return, so he and Paul knew they had to keep proper track of their ideas. They’d no means of recording them and neither could read or write music, so Paul appropriated a Liverpool Institute exercise book, maybe forty-eight feint-ruled pages, in which every new song had a fresh page. In his neat left-handed script, generally using a fountain pen, he wrote the words (they were always words, never lyrics) with chords shown by their alphabetical letter. Unable to describe the melody, they decided early on that if they couldn’t remember something the next day, they could hardly expect it to stick in the mind of anyone else, in which case it was “crap” and deserved to go. But sometimes Paul wrote atmospheric directions. For one song it was “Ooh ah, angel voices.”

  And on the top of every new page, above the song title, Paul wrote:

  ANOTHER LENNON-MCCARTNEY ORIGINAL

  The influence for this wasn’t rock and roll so much as the great American songwriting teams of older generations, the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe and other famous combinations who wrote for Hollywood and Broadway.11 From the outset, John and Paul settled on Lennon-McCartney as a partnership, with that name order. Lennon came before McCartney alphabetically, and he was almost two years older, and it was his invitation, and, surpa
ssing any other consideration, it was simply the way of things: John always came first. While equal in terms of contribution, Paul had to accept that one of them was just a little more equal than the other. Second billing wasn’t in his nature, though. Paul accepted it from his fairground hero and positively no one else. “We were really looking at being Rodgers and Hammerstein, and famous writing duos always had their name the same way. You didn’t hear ‘Hammerstein and Rodgers,’ it just didn’t sound as good. So we always wanted to have people say, ‘Oh, that’s a Lennon-McCartney song.’ ”12

  Neither planned to do anything with these songs (to send them off to singers, publishers or record companies) but they agreed—by actually discussing it, albeit briefly—that each could continue to operate independently, writing songs on his own and then bringing them to the other for approval and the joint Lennon-McCartney credit. “We decided on that very early on,” says Paul. “It was just for simplicity really, and—so as to not get into the ego thing—we were very pure with it.”13

  Competition was nonetheless an ever-essential component. John had complete admiration for Paul’s facility with harmony and melody, his musicianship and invention; Paul respected John’s musical talent and envied his original repartee. Yet while combining their skills as a team, they remained competitive as individuals, each trying to outdo the other. It became a vital artistic spur: John would call it “a sibling rivalry … a creative rivalry,” Paul spoke of “competitiveness in that we were ricocheting our ideas.”14 Each tried to impress the other out of sheer fear of what he might say in return. Both were rarely less than candid, and the thought that a new song might be branded “crap” was usually more than enough to continually raise standards.