Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  But not for long.

  Most likely in May or June 1954, Richy fell seriously ill again. The problem this time was pleurisy, and once more Lazarus found himself out of school and in the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital, where he’d lived through 1947–8. He was there for ten weeks this time, during which his condition developed into tuberculosis. Liverpool was very bad for TB: the industrial fug gave it one of the highest rates in Europe. The only cure was a long period of rest in cleaner air, so Richy was sent to the hospital’s convalescence outpost in Heswall, on the leafy Wirral, the other side of the Mersey.

  His recuperation promised to be a slow old process. No one had any real idea when he’d get out—a year, maybe two?—and this hammered the final nail into his school education. Recognizing his plight, and that of his fellow young inmates, the hospital arranged for vocational teachers to come into the wards. Richy learned to knit, he painted, he made baskets, and he crafted a farm island from papier-mâché. Most stirringly of all, a music teacher came to the ward every fortnight with a collection of percussion instruments. She handed out tambourines, cymbals, triangles, maracas and six-inch drums, and put up an easel on which she pinned a large rolled-out music sheet with color-coded notes; if she tapped red, the children with drums would have to strike them, green was for shaking the tambourine, and so on, in the hope that the cacophonous combination would approximate “Three Blind Mice” or “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”12 Richy was obstinate in his refusal to join in unless the teacher gave him a drum. It was the first time he’d picked up a drumstick and the first time he’d hit something like a proper drum. The dream conceived at a Dingle shop window came to life in a Heswall hospital, and it was love at first strike.

  In Liverpool on July 5, 1954, Richy Starkey was in the hospital, John Lennon was rampaging at Quarry Bank, Paul McCartney was finishing his first year at the Institute, and George Harrison was ten days away from leaving primary school … while, in Memphis, a 19-year-old singer-guitarist was recording a session in Sam Phillips’ music studio at 706 Union Avenue. Over a few hours, gelling with local players Scotty Moore (guitar) and Bill Black (standup bass), the youth recorded four sides. Nobody looked anything like him, dressed anything like him, sounded anything like him, or had a name anything like his. He was Elvis Presley.

  Phillips had opened his studio four years earlier and prayed for this: a white boy who sang country, the blues, anything, with a voice as rhythmic, as soulful, as tuneful, as dynamic and electrifying as the best he’d ever heard. When Elvis first walked into the studio and the receptionist asked what type of singer he was, who he sounded like, the boy had mumbled, “I don’t sound like nobody.” It was a statement of modesty, not brashness, and obviously true. On July 19, 1954, as he drew up a two-year contract for Elvis to sign, Phillips released the boy’s first record, “That’s All Right” c/w “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”† Sun 209, bright yellow label. The A-side—aka “That’s All Right Mama”—was originally an electric blues by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, a black guitarist from the Mississippi Delta; “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was a waltz number by country star Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys. Elvis, Scotty and Bill did them uptempo and Sam Phillips recorded them single track, live, no overdubs but lots of “slap echo” (also “slapback,” simply achieved with tape by feeding the output signal from the playback head back to the recording head, the split-second delay between the two effecting an echo).

  Reviewing the new record, Billboard magazine—one of the two main US music trade weeklies, along with Cash Box—called Presley a “potent new chanter.” In his first advertised stage appearance, on July 30, he demonstrated wild behavior, his legs shaking and his hips swiveling and his pelvis thrusting and his top lip curling. News spread fast: the boy had a dangerous sexual image to go with his unique sound. The more the Memphis radio stations played the record, the more orders rolled into Sun.

  Three months before this, on April 12, Bill Haley and His Comets had gone into the Pythian Temple studio on West 70th Street, Manhattan, and recorded “Rock Around the Clock,” the song that would light the blue touchpaper under what, in America, was starting to be called “rock and roll.” The phrase had been around for decades and meant different things to different people. In black gospel it meant the loving embrace and power of Jesus and God; in other black circles it meant sex—it was a synonym for “fucking.” The sound itself was overwhelmingly rhythm and blues—written, played and sung by black artists for a black audience—music that was confident, assertive, exciting and irresistible, grooves that oozed swing, rhythm and beat, with punchy vocals that spoke of life, love and sex. It was called “rock and roll” by Alan Freed, a rabidly enthusiastic white radio DJ from Cleveland, Ohio, whose incessant championing of the music he loved rode roughshod over all the conventions of the day to effect, ultimately, nothing less than unparalleled racial integration.‡ A huge success in Cleveland from 1951, Freed switched to the mighty New York AM station WINS in 1954, where he pumped rock and roll up and down the East Coast through a 50,000-watt transmitter.

  Bill Haley was a guitarist, singer and former Indiana State yodeling champion who, sensing the coming direction, switched from cowboy music and “western swing” to music with a slapped bass and swooping guitar solos. Slicking down a distinctive “kiss curl” hair loop, Haley picked up the groove and changed the name of his group from the Saddlemen to the Comets.§ They attacked “Rock Around the Clock” from the first snare double-beat, keeping a solid tempo through and beyond an exotic electric guitar solo in the bridge. The entire band honked and swung in a combination so infectious that the meaning of “rock” wasn’t considered—was Haley suggesting partying for a whole twelve hours or bedroom activity?

  For the moment, few heard it. It was only a B-side, captured in two takes inside the last thirty minutes of a three-hour session. The record was issued in America in May and barely registered. It wasn’t released in Britain at this time and nor was Elvis Presley, and no one yet sensed any sign of a musical uprising.

  Finally, but also of major importance, another slow-burning revolutionary record was cut in London on July 13, eight days after Elvis swung “That’s All Right Mama” in Memphis. It was just another day at the Decca studio in West Hampstead and Chris Barber’s Jazz Band had come in to make a ten-inch LP, New Orleans Joys. A popular element of Barber’s live shows since 1952 was a supplementary spot where some of his musicians indulged in a little “skiffle,” a loose guitar-led jazz-band sound originating in 1920s black Chicago—rent party music played on basic instruments. Barber’s singer-guitarist Lonnie Donegan and two others (Barber himself on standup bass, Beryl Bryden on washboard) quickly cut five songs, including Richy Starkey’s party piece in Liverpool, “Nobody’s Child,” and one called “Rock Island Line,” a chugging and then accelerating train song about a stretch of the Chicago Rock Island & Pacific railway line. New Orleans Joys came out, sold to the few British jazz aficionados who had the wherewithal to afford an LP, and that was that … for the time being.

  George Harrison, one of the many British boys whose lives would be changed by Donegan, left Dovedale Road school two days later; like others in his situation, he was dismayed when the headmaster told them that, though they were the biggest children in the school now, at their next they’d be the little ’uns again. “It seemed such a waste, after all that hustling to be one of the big lads,” George would reflect.13

  George hated Liverpool Institute from the start. He resented the lessons and despised almost all the teachers. “I was a real lout in my youth. When I was a kid I liked to run about, jump, do all those things kids do, but then they took me away and put me in high school where we didn’t do anything except Latin and logarithms.”14 On his first day, September 8, 1954, another new boy, Tony Workman, jumped on his back from behind a door and said, “Do you wanna fight, la?” They did, and then became friends. George’s closest Institute pal was Arthur Kelly, who lived in Edge Hill; along with Tony Workman, they all be
gan in form 3E, and owing to alphabetical arrangement Harrison and Kelly were seated next to each other. They quickly found much in common, not least a comprehensive dislike of pretty much everything going on hereabouts. They and Tony became a terrible trio in the eyes of the school’s begowned masters, intent upon doing as little work and extracting as much fun as possible, and if that meant being disruptive then it meant being disruptive. “Harrison, Kelly and Workman—get out!” would be barked as frequently at the Institute as “Lennon and Shotton—get out!” at Quarry Bank.

  George’s frustrations were expressed through unruly behavior and use of fists. “I was never a bully except in the first few years of grammar school, trying to deal with frustrations, punching a few people. You can’t smile, and [it was] ‘Be here!’ and ‘Shut up!,’ and exams every year, and the teachers were either old war veterans with no legs or eyes or [they were] fresh out of college. That’s when the darkness came in, that was where my frustrations started. You would punch people just to get it out of your system.”15

  If George wasn’t already smoking by the age of 11, he was soon after. Though the demarcation in school years was emphatic, with little or no fraternization between boys at different levels, the secluded area of the playground known as “smokers’ corner,” behind the air-raid shelter, gathered a mixture of ages. This was where George first met Neil Aspinall, starting a lifelong friendship. “I used to be with him behind the shelter at break-time saying, ‘Gis a drag,’ ” Neil would recall.16 Someone would keep watch for masters on the prowl, and when none were around the lads imagined they’d put one over on them. The men weren’t so easily fooled. As Arthur Kelly says, “I remember a teacher saying to George, ‘Smoking well, Harrison?’ ‘What do you mean, sir?’ ‘Look at your fingers, boy, they’re like Belisha beacons!’ And they were—they were bright orange.”17

  Paul McCartney, now in his second year at the Institute (form 4B), wasn’t yet a smoker, but the day was coming fast. He and George had something else in common anyway: both were Speke boys who caught the bus to and from school every day, either the 82D or the express 500. George boarded one stop after Paul, and they tended to sit upstairs, where smoking was allowed. Establishing even so much as a rough date for when they first talked is impossible, but, recognizing each other’s school uniform, they did. “Being close to each other in age, we talked,” Paul confirms, “although I tended to talk down to him, because he was a year younger.” George, in 1963, when filling out a questionnaire that asked for his first impression of Paul, wrote “fat and friendly.”18

  In his thirteenth year, Paul was going through a prepubescent chubby stage. He was touchy about it, and “had someone” at school (punched him hard) for making fun of him. The friendly phrase within the family was “puppy fat,” though brother Mike would call him “Fatty!” before running away fast. He later remarked of this period in Paul’s life that it was “the only time that anything outwardly affected him.”19

  A good photo of Paul, standing in front of a window announcing HOT DOG CORNER, was taken at this time by Mike when the McCartney family were on holiday. In summer 1954 they took the train to the Butlin’s camp at Pwllheli, on the northwest coast of Wales, and Jim was trusting enough to allow Mike use of the family’s Kodak box camera. Mike was ten, and the moment he pressed the shutter a deep and lasting interest in photography clicked within him—much as Richy Starkey felt when he first hit a drum.20

  The McCartneys were at Pwllheli through a family connection. Bett Danher (Jim’s niece as well as Mary’s cousin) had become engaged to Mike Robbins, who was working the summer season as a Butlin’s Redcoat—an entertainer and all-around good sort. Paul was pleased to have an “in” on this side of things, and one day saw five young men exit the ballroom, all identically dressed in tartan flat caps, gray crew-neck sweaters, tartan shorts and pumps. They came from Gateshead, and Paul watched as every head turned to look at them. In that second, he had an epiphany, seeing the potent impact of a group of performers all dressed alike. It was a vision he’d not forget.21

  The first chart in Britain to rank sales of “popular” records as opposed to classical records or sheet music sales had been launched by the weekly paper New Musical Express (to become known as the NME) in November 1952. In its first two years, almost every chart song was caked in goo, from syrupy beginning to saccharine end. There was nothing to fuel so much as a grain of youthful rebellion, nothing to make anyone snap off a disc in disgust. When records of rhythm and beat came along, when rock and roll exploded, it filled a vacuum none had realized existed, and so it seemed—no, was—radical, raucous, revolutionary, rousing, shocking and, like most new forms of music, a threat to the controlling powers.

  Into this ultra-safe environment the week before Christmas 1954 exploded “Shake, Rattle and Roll” by Bill Haley and His Comets, the disc breaking through just as it had in America, where it spent ten weeks in the Cash Box top ten. The song penetrated Britain solely on the strength of promotion on Radio Luxembourg and some spins on AFN.‖ Nowhere could the BBC Light Programme accommodate this music: the network had no disc jockey shows, and was anyway prevented from unlimited playing of records by the so-called “Needletime” agreement.a

  In America, pretty much every adult who heard the new sound despised it, many fearing it as “jungle music” or “the devil’s music” … but young people loved it. In April 1955, Alan Freed’s Rock ’n’ Roll Easter Jubilee ran five times daily at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, a galaxy of acts doing one song each, running on and off stage while Freed cranked the excitement in between. This delicious mayhem shattered the house record, grossing $107,000. The US entertainment industry was both disgusted and wowed.

  A clinching factor in America’s linkage of rock and roll with juvenile delinquency was the use of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” over the opening and closing credits of a new MGM movie, Blackboard Jungle. In this, teachers at an urban New York high school are confronted by hoodlum students: Spics, Jews, Niggers, Micks (their words), Italians and other insolent and violent elements. For teenagers, the film taught rebellion more than any movie before; for everyone, it coupled the sound of rock and roll with the image of foulmouthed, flick-knife-wielding louts in leather jackets and strange hairstyles. Wherever Blackboard Jungle went, so did “Rock Around the Clock.” Decca reissued the former B-side and it tore up the US charts, settling at number 1 for eight straight weeks in the summer of 1955. Soon it would have the same effect in Britain.

  Going to the pictures was beyond the reach of the boy still stuck in the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital at Heswall. As 1954 clicked into 1955 and spring bloomed there remained no sign of when he might get out. Every clock had stopped but for the one that can’t. Approaching 15, Richy Starkey was going through puberty. He’d had some sexual experiences at a much younger age but that was just inquisitive stuff; now he was intent. He was feeling frisky, and asked for (and says he sometimes got) a fair old goodnight kiss from one or two of the younger nurses. There was also a bit of sneaking around between the boys’ and girls’ wards, but patients required patience: “I’d stand there for hours trying to get a touch of tit,” he’d recall.22

  The only other joy to break the monotony of month after month in the hospital came through the drums. Richy had his first regular exposure here to the magic of television, boys and girls being allowed to watch the daily hour of BBC children’s shows from five until six o’clock, and in the magazine program Jigsaw he saw George Fierstone, a drummer who, as the boy would enthuse, could “twiddle his sticks.” “I went, ‘Wow! Look at this man, twiddling the sticks!’ ”23 The combination of Fierstone’s drumming skills and the fortnightly ward visit from the music teacher with her percussion instruments consumed the lad. There would be Richy Starkey—far from home, family and mates—a tough survivor, banging his drum as if beating out time.

  John Lennon was out during the afternoon of Saturday, June 4, 1955. Mimi and biochemistry student Michael Fishwick (the
longest-staying lodger at Mendips, 1951–8) were finishing a meal when they heard her husband George start to make his way downstairs. He arrived near the bottom with a speed and a bump that sent Fishwick scurrying from the table. “He was bleeding from the mouth. It was pretty obvious it came from the stomach, a hemorrhage.”24 George was rushed to Sefton General Hospital but never recovered: he died the following day, a post-mortem establishing the cause as “cirrhosis of liver (non alcoholic)” and burst abdomen. He was 52.

  John had experienced much seismic upheaval in his life, but this was the first time he suffered the death of one so close: George wasn’t only his uncle, he’d been his surrogate father for nine years. Mimi would later say, “I think John was very shocked by George’s death, but he never showed it”; but John would eventually be much more expressive on the matter. He’d recall that, as he didn’t know how to be sad in public, he went up to his room with his cousin Liela Birch and they “laughed and laughed,” feeling guilty about it afterward. Liela herself said only, “It was a terrible shock to us all, but especially to John who looked on him as a father.” Paul McCartney remembers John saying (some years later) that, with his dad leaving him and Uncle George dying, he started to feel like he was a jinx on the male side of the family.25

  A poem handwritten by John for Mimi on the day of George’s funeral shows him far from heartless about her loss, and fearlessly open in his condemnation of her sisters, his mother included, for insufficiently stirring themselves in her hour of need. Mimi was, he wrote, “the best of the five.”

  Mimi

  The worry and strife, that’s been wont to her life,

  Has driven her family to shame.

  If they should survive, to one hundred and five,

  They could never repay her again.

  Each one in their turn, will finally learn