This same summer, when the Harrisons caught up with their friends the Brewers again, back at the Sandy Bay holiday camp in Exmouth, George had a new obsession to share with his friend Jenny. “He was now mad on music. He asked if I’d heard the real one. It was ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley. I said, ‘Who?’ ‘Elvis! Elvis Presley!’ He didn’t have his guitar with him, but he loved the music with a passion.”24
Peter Harrison was instrumental in getting George back on the guitar. George’s cheap old Egmond had been sitting in pieces in the cupboard ever since George had taken a screwdriver to its neck. All the Harrison boys were useful with their hands: Harry repaired diesel engines for a living, and Peter—who left school at 15, in 1955—had taken up automotive panel-beating, maintaining the Harrisons’ interest in the motor trade; he also bought himself a motorbike, which George loved. Peter set to work on George’s guitar and managed to get it back in one piece. More than that, he showed him a couple of chords he’d been taught by someone. And so George got back in the habit of spending evenings practicing the guitar, and he stuck at it. His intense single-minded dedication, hour after hour, day after day, was evident to all who saw it. And when his determination wavered there was his mum to give him every encouragement. “You’ll do it, son, you will, just keep at it, you’ll do it.” Sometimes, Louise sat up with him until two or three in the morning, long after Harry had gone to bed, supplying endless pots of tea and watching and supporting while his fingers made the shapes.25
With rock and roll so restricted on radio and TV, the surest way of hearing the latest sounds was to go to the funfair. In the south end of Liverpool, the fair periodically visited a park in Garston and also Sefton Park. One night at the Sefton Park fair, dressed in his Teddy Boy drape, Richy Starkey bumped into a young lad he knew a little from Hunt’s, Roy Trafford. He too was a Dingle boy, and almost instantly the pair became best mates, starting a strong and lifelong friendship. “We had a good night there in the fair,” Roy recalls. “They played all the top records. You couldn’t afford to buy them but they played the best in the fairground, and the girls were there as well. It was the excitement of the fair, the waltzer and all that business. We hit it off as mates because we both liked the same kind of things. We became more like brothers—I was the nearest thing he ever had to one, and there was an instant affection there as men, as brothers. It was great. A nice feeling.”26
Richy and Roy not only worked in the same place, they loved rock and roll and American country music and wanted to play it: Roy was interested in the guitar and Richy was still thudding his great one-sided bass drum. They went to each other’s houses (Roy lived in the Dingle, at 7 Paulton Street), listened to Radio Luxembourg together, dressed like Teds—Richy wore a black drape jacket, Roy blue—liked a drink and wanted girls. It was a perfect arrangement, and they quickly formed the kind of earthy bond George Harrison had with Arthur Kelly and John Lennon had with Pete Shotton—solid friends who lived life similarly and shared attitudes, bluntness and candor.
Roy was quick to spot that though Richy remained physically weakened from his illnesses, “he was always strong, mentally.” Never one to hold back from speaking his mind, Richy went to the management at H. Hunt & Son and complained, “Come on, I’m here to be a joiner, not on the bike.”27 Since there were no vacancies on the woodwork side, he was offered a fitter apprenticeship instead, metalwork, a junior member of the team making the diving stage for the 1958 Empire Games swimming pool. He joined a trade union—probably the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU)—was given a toolkit, and began learning how to make small parts, working at a bench and using the lathe and drilling machines. Though still paid £2 10s, his wage would rise incrementally to £6, and he faced the prospect of qualifying in 1961 on £12–15 a week, though he’d have to do part-time study for that. He worked weekdays from 8AM to 5:30PM, clocking on and clocking off with a punch card, and took tea-breaks and lunch (everyone called it “dinner”) at a few tables in the basement, among the wood shavings. After work, he and Roy usually went for a few at the pub, perhaps the Sefton Arms or the Empress or Yates’s Wine Lodge, where Elsie worked behind the bar. The minimum legal age for drinking was 18 but they were rarely refused. Richy was following a pattern established by most of his family for close on a century, leading the Dingle life, finding work, rest and play—and also the gang—within its bleak streets.
The new school year at Liverpool Institute was George Harrison’s third, and his continued placement in the E stream (form L5E) set him only one rung above the bottom of the ladder. Of his own volition, he was well on the road to nowhere—or, at any rate, not where others hoped he would go. He still hated school, doing his damnedest to learn the minimum and disrupt the maximum. One way of rebelling was to subvert the school uniform: he wore big brother Harry’s bright yellow waistcoat under his blazer, and his school cap (compulsory) sat high on top of his Elvis quiff, looking patently ridiculous. Masters were always hammering George over the length of his hair, but he stubbornly and heroically refused to yield.
Paul was now in form U5B, crossing the divide into the Upper School (though his parents still insisted he wear short trousers). Institute boys in the A, B and C streams were fast-tracked to sit some GCE O-Levels at 15, a year earlier than most schools, and Paul was set to take two (Spanish and Latin) in summer 1957, at the same time as John Lennon would be taking his at Quarry Bank. They were following a similar path in one other respect too: Paul slipped dramatically down his class during the school year 1955–6, from ninth to tenth to twentieth over three terms. There was strong resentment at always being told what to do, and his growing obsession with Elvis and rock and roll wasn’t helping.
By the start of September, the film Rock Around the Clock had been out for six weeks. It played the Gaumont in Liverpool from August 19 to 25: John didn’t see it at this time; George went; Paul took a girl he knew from primary school; Richy had seen it a couple of weeks earlier, on the Isle of Man, and was one of the first to witness how it provoked great enthusiasm in the audiences.† It wasn’t much, just something, and the Liverpool screening passed by uneventfully. Elsewhere, however, trouble was brewing.
It seems almost wish-fulfilled. DO WE WANT THIS SHOCKIN’ ROCKIN’? queried Patrick Doncaster in the Daily Mirror on August 16. “Can it happen here—the trouble that goes with rock ’n’ roll music in the United States?” The answer, perhaps too eagerly found, had come by the end of the month. At a showing of Rock Around the Clock in Paddington, west London, a 15-year-old boy punched the cinema manager. This routine incident was reported with the brand of relish spiced exclusively in Fleet Street: the punch landed while “in-the-groove teenagers danced in the aisles.” Suddenly there were fresh incidents every day, sought out and covered by the papers as though they’d no part in their magnification. 1,000 ROCK ’n’ ROLL RIOTERS TAKE CITY BY STORM headlined the Daily Mirror on September 10, above one of those revved reports hypocritically blending disapproval with delight. “A thousand screaming, jiving, rhythm-crazy teenagers surged through a city last night, sweeping aside a police cordon and stopping traffic. They had just left the day’s third and last showing of the rock ’n’ roll film Rock Around the Clock at the Gaiety Cinema, Manchester.”
Such headlines instantly attracted the kind of people irresistibly drawn to violence. This meant, among others, Teddy Boys. Rock and roll hadn’t been their music, they predated it, but here they were, desperate to dance, desirous to jive, ready to rip it up, to slash seats, smash lights and threaten cinema staff.
John Lennon remained an avid reader of the daily papers—every page of at least one every day, as well as at least one book a week—and seeing these Rock Around the Clock reports he rushed out to be part of it all. Though finished in Liverpool, the film was showing locally in Bootle and Wallasey. He was out of luck: although there was disorder at both venues, the night he went was trouble-free. (At least, there was none he could see: he wouldn’t have had his glasses on. And he would have
only heard the film.) “I was most surprised,” he’d recall. “Nobody was screaming and nobody was dancing. I’d read that everybody danced in the aisles. It must have all been done before I went. I was all set to tear up the seats too but nobody joined in.”28
Large-scale public disorder quickly becomes everybody’s business, and within days the nation was in rockin’ uproar. As with all press-created tempests, the Rock Around the Clock storm soon blew over, but the fallout would linger for years. Terror of Teddy Boys was now married to the repugnancy felt toward rock and roll. Just like in America. Rock wasn’t just jungle music, rock wasn’t simply sinister, or the music of the devil, it was the music of violence. The view painted rock fans into a corner—it shaped the way people thought about them, about the way they dressed, the music they liked and the instruments they played. Rock fans were pushed down Lonely Street to the edge of society.
In this light, skiffle was consciously sought out and promoted as rock’s antidote. It was acoustic, not amplified, and it was cleaner: the lyrics weren’t suggestive or smutty, and sometimes its practitioners were known to wash. On September 8, plum in the middle of the Rock Around the Clock drama, the Daily Mirror ran a feature by columnist Noel Whitcomb headlined THEY’RE JUST WILD ABOUT SKIFFLE! THE MUSIC THAT SENDS ROCK ’N’ ROLL REELING. Rock, announced Whitcomb, was “as old fashioned as aspidistras” while “skiffle-music is the coming craze.” His article confirmed Soho as the happening place, and explained how easily anyone could play it: it required only guitars, a washboard and, as a makeshift standup bass, “an old tea-chest with a broom handle stuck in the middle.”‡ Whitcomb enthused about the Vipers and singled out their songs “It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” and “Rock Me, Daddy-O” (sic), “all of which I am dead certain are bound right for the hit parade.”
Whitcomb knew what he was talking about because he’d not gone to the 2i’s Coffee Bar alone to compile his report, he’d had the company of a young recording manager from EMI by the name of George Martin, who was desperate to save his under-threat Parlophone label by finding new talent. Tipped off about a young cockney singer from Bermondsey, Tommy Hicks, and the resident group who backed him, George went to check them out. Though not thinking much of the singer, he liked the backing group. EMI’s standard penny-per-record contract was theirs for the taking, and they took it, thrilled at the prospect of appearing on Parlophone’s blue Super Rhythm-Style label. So it was that George Martin became the first record producer to sign a skiffle group, and in so doing the first to sign a group whose name was drugs-related, “viper” being 1930s slang for a cannabis smoker—a detail of which the Parlophone manager was blissfully unaware.29
Mary McCartney had her 47th birthday on September 29, receiving all the usual felicitations for “many happy returns.” She now knew otherwise. Around this time, amid discretion so great her two children knew nothing of it for a long time to come, she went into the hospital for a mastectomy. Breast cancer had been diagnosed. Jim knew the score but adhered to Mary’s wish that Paul and Mike not be told: mum was the word. The closest either came to finding anything amiss was when Mike investigated a curious sound coming from his mother’s bedroom. “I could just hear this strange noise, it sounded like crying, so I went into her room and there she was doing her rosary beads. I said, ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ and she said [swiftly], ‘Nothing, son.’ She knew what was happening.”30
Mike assumed she was crying because he and Paul had been naughty. “We could be right bastards,” he says. But then it all just happened so fast. The cancer had already spread and Mary went into the David Lewis Northern Hospital on October 29 very poorly, with a brain tumor. Paul and Mike visited, though still not knowing what was wrong. Mary put on a brave face, and they never saw her again. They were packed off to Park Lane, Aintree, to stay with Uncle Joe and Auntie Joan, and couldn’t understand why this customary venue for the McCartney clan’s uproarious New Year’s Eve parties was so subdued. The boys loved Joe for his great Liverpool humor but even he was quiet. Paul and Mike slept in the same bed and wondered what on earth was going on.
The end came two days later. Jim put his hand on Mary’s cheek and she said, “Jim, I love you.” She told her sister-in-law Dill Mohin, “I would have liked to have seen the boys growing up.” Rosary beads were tied around her wrist, a priest administered last rites, and she died.
Jim broke the news to the boys. Mike, who was especially close to his mother, burst into tears, a core part of him shattered irrevocably. Paul’s response was less expected and not at all what Jim or anyone else wanted to hear. “Mum was a working nurse. There wasn’t a lot of money around—and she was half the family pay packet. My reaction was: ‘How are we going to get by without her money?’ When I think back on it, I think, ‘Oh God, what? Did I really say that?’ It was a terrible, logical thought which was preceded by the normal feelings of grief. It was very tough to take.”31
Paul and Mike stayed with Joe and Joan McCartney several more days; they didn’t attend their mum’s requiem mass or committal even though they took place on a Saturday when there was no school.32 Eight years later, Mike looked back with candor on these first few days, reflecting on how he and Paul both felt the important thing was to show their cousins they weren’t “softies.” He referred to his brother’s comment about the money—“Paul made some flippant remark which sounded pretty callous at the time”—but he also added: “Paul was far more affected by Mum’s death than any of us imagined. His very character seemed to change and for a while he seemed like a hermit. He wasn’t very nice to live with at this period, I remember. He became completely wrapped up in himself and didn’t want people breaking in on his life.”33
Paul’s way of dealing with the crisis was to seem unaffected by it. He just carried on. “I learned to put a shell around me.”34 Tough as it was to see or hear his dad crying, Paul got his head down and pushed forward.
His concern over how the family would manage without Mary’s money was real. In Jim’s ten postwar years back at Hannay’s, the Liverpool cotton market had never really managed to pick up. He was bringing home only £400 a year—£8 a week—which wasn’t much to pay the bills, feed and clothe two lads and leave something on the side for a flutter on the horses. On top of that, he was ever fearful of being made redundant.
Everyone felt for him, a widower at 54 and the single parent of boys aged 14 and 12. The McCartneys’ domestic roles had always divided along lines that were traditional everywhere (though, if possible, even more rigorously applied in the north of England): men were breadwinners, not breadmakers. Men worked, whereas women merely ran everything in the house and managed everyone’s lives. Jim was faced with having to learn to cook and clean in a house so new to them Mary hadn’t left much of an imprint. The wider McCartney family—resolutely close-knit, comforting and down-to-earth—did all they could to help, which was a lot. Paul and Mike had always loved their relatives, and from this point these aunties, uncles and cousins assumed an even greater role in their lives, the relationships rooting deeper than ever, strong and safe.
John Lennon experienced the euphoria of hearing Little Richard in the spring of 1956—that thrilling, life-changing moment—but it wasn’t until November that the rest of Britain shared the joy, when Decca’s London label issued “Rip It Up” c/w “Ready Teddy” as his first British single. Both tracks were in the same vein as “Long Tall Sally” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’ ”: big-band rave-ups with vocal, piano and saxophone, the sax accenting the sex. Richard screamed all over the place and provoked shivers. “We’d never heard anybody sing like that in our lives, and all those saxes playing like crazy …” John would recall, adding, “The most exciting thing about early Little Richard was when he screamed just before the solo; that howling. It used to make your hair stand on end.”35
“Rip It Up” c/w “Ready Teddy” was a bolt from the blue for Paul McCartney. He too experienced the epiphany: first Elvis and now this!
“Little Richard was this voice from heaven or hell, or both. This screaming voice seemed to come from the top of his head. I tried to do it one day and found I could. You had to lose every inhibition and do it.”36 Jim McCartney didn’t like it at all, but Paul was singing like a boy possessed, and in a very real sense he was. Absorbing Elvis, Little Richard and Gene Vincent was glorious, and it could block out other feelings. Paul reveled in the sounds of his great American heroes. He loved the way Little Richard hollered in his songs, a high-pitched “Wooooooo!” evident in almost every recording, and found he had the range and talent to imitate this. Paul would know it as his “Little Richard voice,” though Richard himself admitted to having purloined it from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Wynonie Harris, and Esquerita, the artist whose look, voice and sound he’d all but cloned.
The lure of the guitar was now irresistible to John Lennon. As much as he enjoyed playing the banjo at Julia’s, the instrument was, well, a bit of a joke. Sure, it was good fun, but the banjo had for a long time been looked down on by musicians, the butt of all the gags in the musicians’ joke book. It was yesterday. Gene Vincent played guitar, Elvis Presley played guitar, Lonnie Donegan played guitar. Rock meant guitar, and guitar meant rock. John yearned for one. As he’d recall in later years, “Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted. ‘Please, God, give me a guitar …’ ”37
And, lo and behold, there came one. The winged messenger was a boy at school, his name unknown. Little is remembered of John Lennon’s first guitar. The guitar he called his first guitar would come later, in March 1957, but before that he had this loan of someone else’s, a cheap little acoustic, possibly an Egmond (the same as George Harrison’s), the kind of instrument one would dispose of at the first opportunity and then usually forget to mention. But it was a guitar, and from approximately the last weeks of 1956 (it’s impossible to be more precise than this) John became a strummer, using the banjo chords Julia taught him. And rubbish though this guitar was, the instrument and its temporary owner were seldom parted. Somehow or other now, John knew, he was going to be discovered. He “waited for the big man with the cigar.”38
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