Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  While John was using only the banjo’s first four strings on his guitar, George was being taught all six. Harry Harrison had owned a guitar in his merchant seaman days, pawned in subsequent tough times, and he’d stayed in touch with one of his old shipmates who’d both played and kept his instrument. The man was Len Houghton, or Horton, and he was living above an off-license (liquor store) that he also managed; the shop closed on Wednesday evenings and Harry arranged for George to go there a couple of hours at a time for probably a few weeks. The old seadog was pleased to teach his tricks to this keen and intense youngster, vamping 1920s tunes to demonstrate what George would fondly remember as “old chords” on “the top-of-the-line Hofner, called the Hofner Committee: it was in bird’s-eye maple, a blond guitar modeled after the Gibson 400s.”39

  Those old songs were also the ones Jim McCartney loved—and it was around now that George first got to know him, forming a relationship that was always respectful and cheekily playful. Chatting at school and on buses, George and Paul burst with shared passion for the new music, and this elevated their friendship. George rode his bike from Speke to Allerton in out-of-school hours to talk rock, country, blues and especially guitars—Paul, who hungered for one, and George, who (though eight months younger)§ actually had one. The precise chronology is sketchy, but it was in this period that the pair first played music together. Paul could toot “When the Saints Go Marching In” on his trumpet, and George played the guitar and sang—sounds that bounced around the front parlor at 20 Forthlin Road and the back room of 25 Upton Green, when Paul cycled back to where he used to live.

  Perhaps in or around November 1956, after having played his guitar only a short while, John Lennon hit upon the idea of forming a group.‖ No cigar man was going to find him playing on his own. And, as Pete Shotton noticed, not only did John evidently fear stepping out alone, so too would he never have considered fronting a collection of strangers. The first person he asked to join his group was his best mate, Pete himself, a subject John broached one day as they were walking across the Quarry Bank school yard. It didn’t matter that Pete couldn’t play anything—this was skiffle, definitively rough and ready. Could he strum a washboard? Pete knew there was an old metal one rusting away in his dad’s garden shed. So he was in. Over the next days, or weeks, John and Pete found more members, including Eric Griffiths, who had a cheap acoustic guitar, and Bill Smith, who offered himself as player of the tea-chest bass. He remembers, “We had a little meeting one afternoon standing in the yard outside the woodwork room. We discussed it [the group idea] and said, ‘Yes, let’s go ahead.’ I stole a tea-chest from that woodwork room—I rode away with it on my bike.”a

  The group lacked a name, and Bill Smith says he came up Quarry Men. “John didn’t like it but the others agreed with me and it was three-to-one. John probably felt it was too ‘Establishment’ but he didn’t suggest anything else. As far as I remember, no other names were suggested.”40 Pete Shotton also has a memory of being the one to think up the name. But whoever had the idea, its origin was evident to all, being the first line of R. F. Bailey’s school song, sung every term: “Quarry men old before our birth.”

  This uncertainty over who decided what, when things happened, and all the many other whys and hows of the Quarry Men, will never be convincingly untangled. By definition, this was a group of teenage school lads getting together and doing things on a level rarely better than disorganized, quite often when “bevvied.” No one kept diaries or documents, most of the activities were out of the public eye, and the numerous participants—there were soon several other Quarry Men—have always had conflicting memories, progressively more so with time. Just as it isn’t crystal clear when John first got a guitar, or when the Quarry Men were formed, so there’ll never be a roll of all the members (some lasted just one rehearsal or performance) or a full list of their engagements. Even the name itself is open to question—it’s been written that they were originally the Blackjacks, maybe for a week, but no one can definitively confirm it. And was it Quarry Men or Quarrymen? Sometimes it was written as two words, other times as one. Although Bill Smith thought up the name he says he has no idea which spelling it was: “I never visualized it written down,” he says.b

  Pete Shotton remembers the group’s first rehearsal taking place in the not-yet-dismantled corrugated-iron Anderson air-raid shelter in his back garden. There was probably more swearing than singing, and definitely more smoking. They also rehearsed at Nigel Walley’s house, when his fiery policeman father was at work. Walley let them in, with no idea of the startling talent he was about to witness. “I’d known John since I was about five but I never knew he had a singing voice like that. We’d been in the choir together but we all had those ‘choir voices’ then. When he started singing rock and roll I’d no idea he could do that.”41

  The Quarry Men played skiffle, but no group with John Lennon in it was going to be stuck pickin’ bales of cotton, lamenting long-lost John, pining for the glimpse of a train’s flickering headlight and smuggling pig-iron past tollgate keepers.c Now he had a guitar, nothing and nobody was going to keep John from singing Elvis, Gene and Carl. And John was the leader, just as he’d been in his every activity since infancy. The only non-grammar-school boy among them was Colin Hanton, the drummer; he was 18, and joined through Eric Griffiths, but knew to whom he must answer. “John didn’t say ‘I am the leader,’ he just led, and we just followed him,” he recalls. “There was never any discussion and it was never a problem. We just assumed John was the leader. He was the singer and whatever he wanted to sing we played.”42

  Bill Smith was soon gone from the Quarry Men, unable to see the point in it, and perhaps because his father told him to stop messing about and start concentrating on his school studies. Colin Hanton aside, this was GCE O-Level year for all of them. In his place, plucking that single piece of string in some new definition of “music,” came John’s Vale Road cronies—first Nigel Walley and then Paul McCartney’s school friend, the brilliant Institute academic Ivan Vaughan, who pinned a sign to the tea-chest: “Jive with Ive, the ace on the bass.” Lennon’s gang of scufflers at six had become Lennon’s group of skifflers at 16.

  Harry Graves had done much for his stepson since marrying Elsie Starkey, but he wouldn’t have welcomed anyone’s congratulation for it. He and Richy simply rubbed along. They even went with ease to the pub together. The lad was benefiting from this love and friendship in all manner of ways, not the least of which was being found job after job after job. (Almost six months in, Richy at last seemed settled at Hunt’s, and his health was finally stabilizing too.)

  Harry went south at Christmas, visiting his parents in Romford, and while there, his father, 68-year-old James Graves, said he’d heard that a local dance band was packing up and a set of drums was for sale.43 Several of the Graves clubbed together and Harry’s offer of £10 was accepted. It was something like a full kit, made in the early 1930s and far from first-rate but, still, a snare, a bass drum with a pedal, a hi-hat and one little tom-tom with a top cymbal. Harry carried it home, struggling manfully with it on the train from Romford to Liverpool Street, down to the Circle Line, around to Euston Square and along the road to Euston mainline station. He then popped it into the guard’s van for the steam train up to Liverpool. He had a moment of panic at Lime Street when waiting for a taxi to the Dingle: while standing there, he noticed the famous bandleader Joe Loss walking toward him. Harry wondered what he’d say when Loss asked him whether he was a drummer … but he walked straight past.

  The last leg of this epic journey of Richy Starkey’s first drum kit was up the tight staircase at 10 Admiral Grove and left, into the lad’s freezing-cold back-bedroom overlooking the privies of the houses on Grinshill Street. It was Boxing Day 1956, or thereabouts. Richy set it up, and for the first time in his life sat behind a drum kit. And then off he went, thrashing away. As he’d recall twenty years on, “I was a load of crap. And then I heard from the bottom of the stairs, ‘Keep t
he noise down! The neighbors are complaining!’ I only ever did it twice and got shouted at both times. I was just this mad thing, hitting drums. So I never practiced. The only way I could practice was to join a group.”44

  * * *

  * 85–93 Windsor Street, the top end, a short walk from Richy’s house. The building was only the width of a triple garage, two stories plus a basement, but it extended far back. It was demolished in the 1980s after the Toxteth riots.

  † It was common for British factories to have a summer close-down period so staff had their holidays and returned to work on the same date. Richy had been at H. Hunt & Son under a month when he had to have this break, and Granny and Grandad Starkey took him with them to the Isle of Man—which was akin to going abroad. He saw Rock Around the Clock at the Gaiety Theatre in Douglas.

  ‡ The handle, or any other kind of pole, was either inserted through a hole in the tea-chest or clamped to its outside. One end of a piece of string or cord was knotted tightly through (or at) the top, the other was tied through a hole in the chest, forming a triangle. Notes were produced by thumping or plucking the string while adjusting its tension by tilting the pole. The player would have one foot planted on the ground and the other (or his knee) on top of the chest, to keep it steady.

  § Paul always said it was nine months and this became how both (with a revealing regularity) referred to it.

  ‖ Again, the date can be put no firmer than this. Recalling events from a distance of ten years, John said the group was not actually his conception but someone else’s—“I think the bloke whose idea it was didn’t get into the group” (Davies, p. 20). This might have been a Quarry Bank lad called Geoff Lee, but no one is certain. John further remembered, “We met at his house the first time,” though Pete Shotton says the first meeting was at his place. What’s more, interviewed in 1971 (by Mike Hennessey for Record Mirror, though this section wasn’t published), John said, “I didn’t have a guitar when I first joined the group, but a guy in the group had a guitar and we used to go to his house and listen to Lonnie Donegan [records].” The notion that John joined the group before he had a guitar (as well as this apparent confirmation that they were someone else’s group to start with) also contradicts every known account.

  a The inclusion of the washboard in John Lennon’s skiffle group shows the primary effect of “Rock Island Line,” on which it was used (played by Beryl Bryden). Since forming his actual Skiffle Group, Lonnie Donegan had distanced himself from the instrument, shunning it in his current recordings and stage shows. The only other outfit to make early use of it was Ken Colyer’s Skiffle Group, whose records never got near the charts and were quite obscure. The Vipers used it too, but their first record, the George Martin–produced “Ain’t You Glad,” wasn’t issued until November 23. And if (as some of its members insist) the formation of John Lennon’s group dates to about November 1956 before the release of that Vipers disc, John wouldn’t have heard or seen the tea-chest bass yet, merely read about it.

  b This book will use the two-word spelling. It’s also not conclusive if they were the Quarry Men (or Quarrymen), a skiffle group, or the Quarry Men (Quarrymen) Skiffle Group, the last two words part of the name (as in the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group and the Vipers Skiffle Group). No one remembers, or much cares. Only one thing is certain: they were a group. Jazz musicians played in bands but skifflers played in groups.

  c The flickering headlight was in “Midnight Special,” another Lead Belly penitentiary song recorded by Lonnie Donegan.

  FIVE

  JANUARY–JUNE 1957

  GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT

  In his attic room atop the former servants’ staircase at Quarry Bank, “Eggy” Bacon, the French master who doubled as careers adviser, surveyed the perpetual challenge that was John Lennon. The lad’s schooling since 1945 had always been leading to this, the climactic 1957 when he must either do well enough in exams to stay in education, or leave to find work … or join the dole queue. Presently placed fifteenth in the lowest stream, class VC (5C), there was little hope he’d pass many O-Levels, so what would become of him? As John would point out years later, “They ask, ‘What do you want to be?’ Nobody ever said that I already was, and we already are.”1 On the spur of the moment (probably) he said he could become a newspaper journalist, but Bacon pronounced this no respectable career for a Quarry Bank boy.

  I said, “Well, present me with some alternative,” and they came up with veterinarian, doctor, dentist, lawyer—and I knew there was no hope in hell of me ever becoming that. So there was never anywhere for me to go. I [didn’t] dare say “artist” because of the social background I came from. Artsy-fartsy people were despised—they still are—in society. I used to say to my auntie, “You like to read about artists and you worship them in museums, but you don’t want ’em living around the house.”2

  This ultra-sharp and edgy youth, this wolf in a grammar-school blazer, now carrying a guitar, was 16 going on 17. Many were repulsed by his attitude and behavior—uncompromising, unpredictable, rude, cynical, sarcastic, anti-authoritarian, quickly bored—but to others he was sensational: a perpetual high-wire act who lived and communicated without a safety net, a faithful friend, generous, honest, gifted, literate, articulate and hugely funny. He dressed and looked tough and was no stranger to fighting, but his hostility was mostly verbal: he could shout louder than anyone else and lacerate with a brevity and wit that took the breath away. “You didn’t banter words with John or you were on a loser before you started,” concedes Pete Shotton.3

  Ahead of John’s GCE O-Levels, to be taken in June, came the “mock” exams. Results in these gave school and pupil the clearest indication of the likely final outcome; John took six and passed only two, English and Art, experiencing plenty of distraction at the time—including, playing in Liverpool’s cinemas, Alan Freed’s latest jukebox musical Don’t Knock the Rock. Here was Little Richard singing “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti,” and nothing in John’s world had ever seemed so dynamic. Decca’s London label coupled the tracks as a new single and “Long Tall Sally” finally scorched to number 3 on the NME chart; Paul McCartney suddenly had another striking piece to add to his repertoire of Little Richard impersonations.

  Though he paled alongside the vibrant Richard, the headlining star of Don’t Knock the Rock was Bill Haley and this was still a heady period for rock’s first monarch. With his kiss curl, Comets, wife, eccentric manager and his eccentric manager’s 77-year-old mother, Haley was about to become the first American rock star to play Britain. His nationwide tour of one-night stands, a Lew & Leslie Grade promotion, was heading to Liverpool on February 20, playing two houses on stage at the Odeon Cinema. Having thrilled to “Rock Around the Clock,” Paul McCartney was desperate to see him. As George Harrison would reflect, “When Bill Haley came to Liverpool I couldn’t afford a ticket. It was fifteen shillings, a lot of money for a schoolboy. I often wondered where Paul got his fifteen shillings from, because he got to see him.”4

  Opting not to dash home and then back into town after school, Paul eagerly occupied his first-house Odeon seat in short trousers, Liverpool Institute cap stuffed deep into blazer pocket. The show began with disappointment, when Paul came face-to-face with an eternal truth of the music business: you don’t always get what you want. It was a feeling he didn’t like and would always remember. He believed he’d spent his hard-saved pocket money on an entire concert by Bill Haley, but first everyone had to sit through a long first half filled by the jazz-swing Vic Lewis Orchestra, the tin-whistle warbler Desmond Lane, and the double-act Kenneth Earle & Malcolm Vaughan (comedian and tenor singer).5 After the interval, though, it happened exactly as Paul wanted it. The lights went down, the house quivered expectantly, there was a dramatic pause in the darkness, Haley and his Comets began the call-and-response “On your marks, get set …” intro to “Razzle Dazzle” and then on the word “Go!” the curtains flew open, the music started jumping and the lights picked them out. “And the
re they all were,” Paul would remember with enthusiasm ever undimmed. “They had tartan jackets on, which sounds terrible now, but it was great then. It was something special, and that’s what I was after: chills.”6 Commissionaires kept fans in their seats, instructed to allow no dancing, but Paul was no passive spectator. The final number was “Rock Around the Clock” and it seemed the Odeon would explode with joy, but then two minutes later it was all over and, as usual, everyone was dashing to get out before the National Anthem.

  And yet, despite the barely checked fervor of young McCartney and plenty of others, many left the Odeon that night dissatisfied, and it was a feeling experienced in cities all over the country. So strongly built-up in advance, the tour ended on a curiously flat note. Beat magazine called it “salesmanship, not musicianship … one of the most embarrassing damp squibs for some years,” and plans for a return visit later in 1957 collapsed when sales of Haley records fell through the floor: before the tour he’d had twelve different hits on the British chart, after it he had none. As hard as it was to get to the top, staying there was so much more difficult.

  Rock and roll only figured in the minds of Liverpool’s jazz fans and musicians when voicing their detestation of it, and this they could now do within their own exclusive venue. The Cavern Club opened on January 16, 1957, in a former fruit cellar at 10 Mathew Street—a dark cobble-stoned alley of tall warehouses, replete with the wooden crates that brought produce from the ships for trading on the international Fruit Exchange. Construction of the club’s music stage was done by Paul McCartney’s uncle Harry Harris and his son, Paul’s cousin Ian, who’d given Paul his first taste of the trumpet.