Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  John and Paul had an abundance of ambition, and top of their lists was to be rich. John’s Aunt Mimi, his surrogate parent since the age of five, told him “possessions don’t bring happiness but they make misery a lot easier,” which was one comfort, but mostly John wanted money to avoid having to work.15 Art college was only a means of delaying the inevitable another four or five years, though he was unlikely even then to have a clear idea how to earn a living. He could only ever see himself as a painter or poet or writer or musician and they didn’t give out those jobs down at the Labour Exchange. John Lennon and conformity were ugly bedfellows—he’d no discipline or desire for office or factory work, and had his own dismissive phrase for such jobs: “brummer striving.”

  Before she died, Mary McCartney had wanted Paul to become a doctor; Jim hoped he’d go to university and become a teacher or writer … but Paul wanted to be a star and had the confidence and talent to shoot for it. And with stardom he’d be rich. About £75,000 would cover what he wanted. As he later said, “If you’d asked me for my fantasies when I was 16 years old, standing at a bus stop waiting to go to Garston on the 86, I’d have said ‘guitar, car and a house,’ in that order. That was it—the entire thing.”16

  These would have been among the thoughts crowding Paul’s mind as he walked from Allerton to Woolton to visit John. By road it was one and a half miles, but on foot or by bike there was a shortcut across Allerton Municipal Golf Course, emerging from the greens onto a bank above Menlove Avenue, diagonally opposite John’s house. Both boys rode bikes to get around, but usually walked if carrying their guitars, not having cases. A long way from streetlamps, the golf course was pitch-black after dark. When Paul was heading home on late winter afternoons he’d try to steady his nerve by playing guitar and singing at the top of his voice. If anybody came along he’d immediately stop and pretend it hadn’t been him, but on one occasion he was halted by a policeman. Paul felt sure he’d be arrested for a breach of the peace but the cop asked him for guitar lessons.17

  John’s house, on a busy dual-carriageway, was a semidetached suburban villa given the name Mendips by its previous occupants. Paul came here less frequently than John’s covert visits to Forthlin Road, turning up mostly on weekends. Conditions at Mendips were different: there was no need for stealth but Mimi made clear what could and couldn’t be done in her house. After the first visit, Paul knew not to use the front door but to walk down the side and knock at the back, which led into the kitchen. (The front was rarely used.) Mimi would call upstairs, “John, your little friend’s here.” She had always been patronizing about his friends, telling him in plain language if she considered them lower class or in some other way not good enough for him. When Mimi said this the first time, John assured Paul, “That’s just the way she is, you mustn’t be offended.”18 Paul watched the two of them with a curious fascination.

  I thought John and Mimi had a very special relationship. She would always be making fun of him and he never took it badly; he was always very fond of her, and she of him. She struck me as being an honest woman who looked after John’s interests and would take the mickey, but she would also say these [belittling] things, purposeful put-downs. I never minded it, in fact I think she quite liked me—out of a put-down I could glean the knowledge that she liked me.19

  Mimi’s husband (John’s Uncle George) had died, and as the combination of a modest rental income and her widow’s state pension was barely going to fund John’s feeding and raising, she took in lodgers, students from Liverpool University. There was always at least one in residence, sometimes three or four, and their need for quiet study meant that Mimi frequently had to remind John to keep the noise down. Also, like her nephew, she was a gluttonous reader and relished peace and quiet.

  Mimi didn’t deny John and Paul space to play their guitars, but insisted they used the porch. It was standing room only in here, another breath exchange, one boy with his back to the front of the house, the other with his back to the internal front door.20 (Despite Mimi’s “little friend” gibe, Paul and John were the same height, almost fully grown.) The porch was no hardship because with its high roof, art nouveau leaded windows and black-and-white-check tiled floor it provided highly prized echo. Budding rock and rollers would do anything for that reverb, to be at least close to the heavenly slap echo sound of the great Elvis records. But for the traffic noise from Menlove Avenue—buses and cars speeding past—they could have been in Sun Studio, Memphis, Tennessee.

  It was in the porch (“vestibule” in Paul’s vocabulary) that John and Paul cracked the chords to Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” one of his first and best Sun records. In a sudden moment of joy, they found it was the same as Paul Anka’s recent hit “Diana,” C–A minor–F–G, known to them from this point as “the Diana chords.” Presley’s cover of Rodgers-Hart’s “Blue Moon” was an eerily minimalist blues and lent itself perfectly to the tiny echoing space. The porch was also good for whistling; Paul, who whistled well, appreciated anyone else who could do it tunefully and John was one of the best around. He often blew as accompaniment to Paul’s singing or playing.

  When Mimi went out shopping they would steal up to John’s little bedroom—the “box room” over the front of the house—and play records. By early 1958, John had amassed a fair collection (some bought, others stolen) of Elvis and Lonnie Donegan. Paul remembers how they spent time trying to anticipate the next music trend, so they could write a song in that style. Convinced that rock and roll would die at any moment, corporate America was trying to kill it, to save time, by kicking off the next kooky craze. John and Paul gave it some thought too, conjuring odd fusions like Latin-rock and rock-rumba and … then gave up. They learned that forcing an idea never worked, that songs had to come naturally. Plenty did: they hoped to write at least one in every session, and in this early period amassed perhaps twenty.

  Few are known beyond their title. “I’ve Been Thinking That You Love Me,” “If Tomorrow Ever Comes,” “That’s My Woman” and “Won’t You Please Say Goodbye.” A song called “Years Roll Along” (“It might have been winter when you told me …”) was never completed. One that was, which they both recognized as the best of this first batch of Lennon-McCartney Originals, was “Love Me Do.” Paul would recall it as a 50:50 effort with John, written in the front parlor at Forthlin Road, but John said it was almost entirely Paul’s. No recording of “Love Me Do” exists before the song changed shape and musical direction after four years had rolled along, but John and Paul both said how everything they wrote in this period was heavily influenced by Buddy Holly, including the vocal style.21

  Another early number, written mostly by John, was “I Call Your Name,” which he would describe as “my effort at a kind of blues.”22 It went down in the book as ANOTHER LENNON-MCCARTNEY ORIGINAL but Paul’s contribution may have been confined only to constructive criticism; he remembers working on it in John’s bedroom.

  Mendips was a window to another world for Paul. John used a portable typewriter to hammer out song words and also his poetry, and because he was a punchy and impatient typist, keystroke errors inevitably added to the jokes.23 John had been writing for years, creating his own cartoons, comics and newspapers with wild wordplay and ideas; songwriting was merely a recent addition to his locker. He ran the two on parallel tracks with no crossover—it was these ideas and words for the printed page and those ideas and words for the songs. Paul, who knew no one else with a typewriter and counted no other poet among his friends, was heavily impressed. John was deep, and there were few higher compliments. Paul would never forget (and always laugh at) the final lines of “The Tale of Hermit Fred,” a poem John let him see, published in the Quarry Bank school magazine just before he left.

  I peel the bagpipes for my wife

  And cut all negroes’ hair

  As breathing is my very life

  And stop I do not dare.

  The McCartneys had always lived in council houses, cheek-by-jowl with the working classes. It gave
them a usefully solid grounding in that particular reality, although Paul’s strongly aspirational mother made sure they considered themselves a cut above. By Paul’s personal definition, John was middle-class, and though there was much about his friend’s domestic situation he didn’t yet know or understand, this was how Paul saw and admired it. “John’s family was rather middle-class and it was a lot of his appeal to me. I’m attracted to that type of person, particularly in the British. John had relatives up in Edinburgh and one of them was a dentist—none of us knew people like that. So I was attracted to that. It wasn’t a social climbing thing, it’s just that I find it attractive.”24

  Paul spotted several other signposts to indicate John’s higher standing. In Mendips’ front room was a full bookshelf that included Sir Winston Churchill’s four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples and six-volume The Second World War—ten leather-bound folio editions John said he’d read, and had. They didn’t just have cats, they had pedigree cats. Paul had aunties, but Mimi was John’s aunt. Then there was Mendips itself—“a house with a name, that was very posh; no one had houses with names where I came from, you were numbers.”25

  It was all irresistibly magnetic, but Paul’s predicament never changed: his dad didn’t approve. This wasn’t going to stop him, but he loved his dad and valued his own good reputation too much to openly rebel like John. It made John mad, and all the more determined to be the troublemaker Jim said he was.

  Paul always wanted the home life. He liked it with daddy and the brother … and obviously missed his mother. And his dad was the whole thing. Just simple things, [like] he wouldn’t go against his dad and wear drainpipe trousers. He treated Paul like a child all the time, cut his hair and telling him what to wear, at 17, 18. I was always saying, “Don’t take that shit off him!” I was brought up by a woman so maybe it was different—but I wouldn’t let the old man treat me like that.26

  Through sheer force of personality, John Lennon changed others’ lives, and many went willingly on the journey. For Paul McCartney, who had a fundamental need to be noticed, stepping forward with John was a natural move—he was aligning himself with someone people couldn’t avoid, and who thrust two fingers up to things in a way he envied but would rarely do in full view. At the same time, Paul could apply gloss, where needed, to minimize John’s trail of damage. Their musical group was formed in John’s image and driven ever onward by his restlessness, but without Paul he would have upset too many people too many times to make the progress they both craved. Paul’s other strengths were his great talent, his burning ambition and his high self-regard … and when John felt them becoming overbearing he’d pull him down a peg or two, as only he could.

  And so Lennon-McCartney stood shoulder to shoulder as equals, connected at every level, their considerable talents harmonized, their personalities meshed, their drive unchecked, their goal in focus. They were a union, stronger than the sum of their parts, and everything was possible.

  OLD BEFORE OUR BIRTH

  ONE

  1845–1945

  IN MY LIVERPOOL HOME

  The significance of the location was unknown to those present that murky day in 1962 when four lads stood in front of a huge tea warehouse by Liverpool’s dock road, having photos taken to publicize their first record. John Lennon certainly had no idea that the clearing of land on Saltney Street on which he was standing was where his family began their life in the city, just a few among the hordes of starving and mostly illiterate Irish fleeing the potato famine in their homeland.

  At least one and a half million stricken Irish men, women and children sailed into Liverpool between 1845 and 1854. Plenty traveled on again, to America, Canada, Mexico and Australia, but a vast number stayed and few of those went very far: Saltney Street was hard by the docks of this great global seaport, ocean liners steaming up and down the River Mersey right at the end of the street. It’s still there today, though the horrors of its cholera-infested housing have been swept away. In Liverpool, history is everywhere you look.

  JOHN LENNON—family background

  James Lennon was the first to put down roots. Born about 1829 in County Down, one of the nine counties to form the province of Ulster, he was married in 1849 on Scotland Road, the slum-ridden heart of Liverpool’s immigrant Catholic community. He fathered at least eight children before his wife died in the act of delivering another, and probably the third of these, in January 1855, was John Lennon, grandfather.

  John (sometimes Jack) Lennon grew into an intelligent, happy-go-lucky soul who sang loud and often in alehouses, worked mostly as a freight clerk, and led an intriguing life of mysteries, dead ends and deceptions. After marrying twice, his longest relationship was with a Protestant woman, Mary “Polly” Maguire. Their first seven babies all died, and of the seven that followed, the fifth was Alfred Lennon, born in December 1912 at the family home in Copperfield Street, Toxteth. After this, they got married.*

  When cirrhosis of the liver killed his father in 1921, Alf was eight. Malnutrition had visited rickets upon the lad, a common condition among the poor, and he wore leg-irons for a considerable part of his childhood. Three years later he was offered a place at the excellent Blue Coat School, in the district of Wavertree, the city’s oldest charitable foundation for the free education of orphans and fatherless children. There was one proviso: Protestants only, and several certificates were sought to prove a half-truth. Alf received a fine education here, and like every Blue Coat boy was regularly marched down to Bioletti’s, the barber’s shop at the nearby Penny Lane roundabout, for a severe scissoring.

  On leaving in 1929, he was found an office placement with a shipping company, and three weeks later, while ambling with his slightly unsteady gait through Sefton Park—one of Liverpool’s many fine green spaces—he met 15-year-old Julia Stanley.

  John Lennon’s maternal family was essentially Protestant. His great-grandfather, William Stanley, born 1846 in Birmingham, had moved to Liverpool by 1868. He and wife Eliza (born in Omagh, County Tyrone, another of the Ulster counties) set up home in Everton, in the north end of the city, and in 1874 gave birth to their third son, George—the “Pop” John Lennon would know until losing him at the age of eight.

  By 1898, George Stanley, a merchant seaman, had united with Annie Milward (born Chester, 1873) and begun to produce a family. For reasons as inexplicable as John Lennon and Polly Maguire’s situation at the same time, they did this outside of marriage, and their experiences were similarly tragic—their first two children died. The third lived, however: Mary Elizabeth Stanley, known as Mimi, was born in Windsor Street, Toxteth, in 1906, just a shout from the Lennons on Copperfield Street.

  John Lennon isn’t known to have been aware that both his father and his Aunt Mimi, key figures in his life, were, in the literally used word of the day, bastards. What he did know is that the Stanleys always believed they were several notches above the Lennons, claiming better breeding, education, nationality, religion, refinement, resources and aspiration, at least some of which is debatable.

  Post-marriage, four more girls were born to George and Annie, all to live long and to create, with Mimi, a posse of five sisters whose allegiances would prove strong in the decades that followed, and whose influence on John Lennon would be of great significance. The third of that final four, Julia—born in March 1914 on the proverbial eve of the Great War—was John’s mother. She was given license within the family as the wild one, free-spirited, her notable wit and pranks enjoyed by all. Her father—the girls called him Dada—taught her banjo and she was talented, able to pick up tunes by ear. She was soon plucking and singing along to popular songs of the day, like “Girl of My Dreams” and “Ramona,” which came across from America in 1927 as sheet music and then via three inventions that progressed rapidly during these years: the wireless, the gramophone and the talking pictures.

  Julia left school in 1929 and met Alf Lennon soon after taking her first job. He wasn’t the kind of young man to object if someone
found him funny. Creating an impression was the thing, even if he was being laughed at, which he was. “You look silly” were the first words said to him by Julia, naturally drawn to the daft. “You look lovely,” he replied, and a relationship was born.

  At the start of the 1930s, Alf left his office job and became a merchant seaman, beginning a long and highly colorful nautical career. Generally known to his shipmates as Lennie (sometimes he was Freddie; he mostly called himself Alf), the sea was for him. The comradeship of his sailor pals was wonderful, there was a thriving black market to make extra loot on the side, he really did get to see the world, and the work was something he did well enough to earn several promotions: shipping records show that he went from bellboy to silver room boy, saloon steward, assistant steward and other, similar positions.

  Alf’s best decade at sea was the first. His close friend Billy Hall laughs as he recalls:

  He was a rascal. An absolute character. You wouldn’t think of going out anywhere without dragging Lennie along. He was always part of the fun—and if there wasn’t any, he’d make some.

  He was an ale drinker, but once he started drinking he’d drink anything. If there was a bottle, he’d stay with it. He was a happy drunk, he just did stupid things on the spur of the moment. Most times he’d get away with it and laugh like hell.1

  Alf had now reached his full adult height, 5ft 3in, and compensated for catcalls by being the comedian. He whistled, played harmonica and loved to sing: he particularly enjoyed “Red Sails in the Sunset,” except he did it as “Red suns in the sailset, all blue I feel day,” having found that twisting words would winkle another laugh.

  Though only sporadically back in Liverpool, Alf always claimed he was faithful to Julia. She, however, was nonplussed about his absences, scarcely reacted when he left, and never went to the docks to see him off. He’d recall how, even though he wrote to her, she never wrote back; and how, when he was home in Liverpool, she treated him coolly. He appears to have been her plaything, an amusing friend repeatedly ambling back into her life and then going away again, at which point she—a rebel spirit with a strong allure to men and a playful, vivacious character—did whatever she pleased. With their higher opinion of themselves, most (or all) of the Stanleys saw Alf as “low,” and there was also the religious schism, Protestant against Catholic, a gulf that violently divided Liverpool in these years.