Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Into the celebratory atmosphere, on the opening day of June, jumped Saturday Skiffle Club, BBC radio’s first teenage music show, given a half-hour slot in the Light Programme at 10AM. It wasn’t much, but it offered skifflers a chance to pick up new songs, and was important in one other respect. Historically, any song with “God” or “Jesus” in its lyrics was avoided by the BBC because of complaints from devout listeners (diminishing in number but still a sizable and powerful lobby). BBC producer Jimmy Grant argued that spirituals were an integral element of the skiffle repertoire and their exclusion would weaken the program; through his persistence, and the popularity of skiffle, a more relaxed approach to the broadcasting of pop music lyrics was gradually introduced, and by one more notch the handbrake of control was eased.

  That same Saturday, a boatload of British teenagers sailed to France on a Rock Across the Channel trip, intent on showing the Froggies (as everyone called them) just how to rip it up. The event was co-promoted by the 2i’s Coffee Bar and one of the ten acts providing its soundtrack was Terry Dene, a boy hotly hyped as “Britain’s newest rock ’n’ roll star.” He’d been “discovered” at the 2i’s and was (mis)managed by its proprietors Hunter and Lincoln, they and an agent creaming 50 percent of his earnings. Dene’s career stumbled from the start, the result of a fragile personality and terrible handling, but his “arrival” again fingered Soho coffee bars as the hotbed of British rock and skiffle talent. As Parlophone A&R manager George Martin disclosed to the Daily Mirror, “I make a regular visit. It has become a breeding ground for talent. Six months ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of going there.”33

  Dene’s first record wasn’t even rock and roll: it was a cover of Marty Robbins’ American country hit “A White Sports Coat (And a Pink Carnation),” and both versions were easily beaten in the charts by another British act, the King Brothers. It became Paul McCartney and Ian James’ theme song as they swanned around Liverpool in the early summer. Paul had a white sports “drape jacket” with a metallic thread that sparkled slightly; Ian had a pale blue coat that passed for white if you didn’t look too hard. Though they skipped the carnations, they thought themselves the song’s living embodiment, flash, and with their narrow black trousers and hair set high felt sure girls would fall at their feet. Collins Fun Fair visited Sefton Park for Whitsun week (June 7–15) and Paul and Ian, after grooming themselves in the mirror, went along with twin goals: to score and to catch all the latest sounds.

  Paul would always recall his first hearing of a perennial favorite: “I remember being in Sefton Park when the fair came to town and standing beside the waltzers as they were spinning around, and playing there at full volume was a track by Charlie Gracie called Fabulous.”34 Ian James adds, “The waltzer span round and round and up and down at the same time. It was always a favorite attraction because you’d take a girl on it and probably her skirt would blow up, and she’d be screaming and throw her arms around you for protection. And they always played great music.”

  While their day at the fair delivered on the musical front, Paul and Ian had no luck chatting up the birds. Nothing. It was such a comedown, and they trooped back to Ian’s house deflated, even in their white sports coats. The route took them past a record shop where Ian splashed the cash for Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” Paul would always invoke this moment when enthusing about rock’s recuperative powers. Though rejected and dejected, they got back to Elswick Street, put on “Hound Dog” and instantly felt great once again, revived in a shade over two minutes by the miracle doctor from Memphis. “After Ian put it on I swear the blues had gone,” Paul would say. “We were like new people.”35

  While Paul and Ian were unsuccessful, the same fair, at perhaps the exact same moment, was proving triumphant ground for Richy Starkey. He and Roy Trafford, both in their best Ted togs, found a pair of assenting judies and, after treating them to a few rides and trinkets, managed to lose their virginity simultaneously on a nearby grass verge, within range of the fairground’s evocative sounds and smells. Richy was immediately addicted to the new fruit. “Once in and you want to live there,” he would say. “It [sex] was always on my mind, for a long time.”36

  As the GCE O-Level exams approached, the Quarry Men suddenly had a flurry of bookings. On the morning of Sunday, June 9, they were in the queue that snaked around the Liverpool Empire, a ragged line of guitars, washboards and tea-chests, their owners clinging to the hope of impressing an established star-making impresario. Here, literally, was the man with the cigar John Lennon had been awaiting. Strangely, this great fan of Lewis Carroll was now pinning his hopes on Carroll Levis.

  Levis was a particular player in British show business for a quarter-century, an overweight, silver-haired Canadian in a tailored Savile Row suit who’d abandoned his own career as a Variety entertainer (his act was hypnotism and necromancy) and arrived in Britain in the mid-1930s to start a touring talent-spot show. Winners of his stage show were offered a spot in his fortnightly ATV series, and everyone was desperate to appear in front of the cameras—this gold-plated gateway to riches and happiness. In these early days of television, if you appeared “on the box” in any capacity you were instantly a star, treated differently by people from the moment they next saw you. They’d stop and gawp in the street, amazed that a TV personality was before their very eyes. Film was something else—you had to be an actor to be in the movies—but TV could pick up ordinary folk and make them famous.

  Levis in the theater was the usual twice-nightly affair, the first half of each performance filled with professional Variety acts (some were past discoveries who’d “made it” … this far) and the second showcasing between twenty and twenty-four acts of local amateur talent, each given a couple of minutes on stage to grab what Levis called “the chance of a lifetime.” He was looking for two winners twice a night, assessed on the strength of the audience’s applause when all the acts returned for another bow at the end. There was no technical apparatus for measuring this, but with all Levis’ experience he could tell a winner instinctively.§ The qualifiers from the first five nights would then battle it out in the week’s climactic show, second-house Saturday, Levis promising the champion a step up to “the stairway to stardom”—that is, a couple of minutes on TV before vanishing up their own ether, never to be heard of again. It was a right old show-business racket.

  This being summer 1957, skiffle was overwhelmingly popular among the aspiring stars. When the Quarry Men got into the Empire, John Lennon filled out the necessary form and, after a long wait in the auditorium, they finally stepped onto the mighty stage, scene of all those magical pantomimes of his childhood. Levis sat at a table stage left, John said, “We’re the Quarry Men,” and a couple of minutes later the great man said, “That’s fine,” and booked them for the show proper, the week after next. So far, so good.

  That big TV Star Search week was June 17–23, coinciding precisely with O-Levels. No lists survive to relate who appeared when, but Richy Starkey would remember playing Empire talent contests with the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group and this was probably one of them, while another combo to qualify for the show proper were the Ravin’ Texans, a skiffle group led by Al Caldwell and his mate Johnny Byrne, a couple of lads who’d not (as their name implied) flown over from Fort Worth but hopped the bus down from Broad Green. Colin Hanton and Rod Davis remember the Quarry Men’s appearance being the Wednesday night (June 19). This was it, then. Success here, and again on the Saturday, and they’d be on television.

  Banjo player Rod says they played one number, “It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song.” Drummer Colin recalls they had quite a few supporters in the audience, though not as many as another group who not only got more applause but were also, he says, mysteriously given the chance to play a second number. The Quarry Men drew less applause than one or two other acts and weren’t chosen to proceed to Saturday’s final. It was over. TV stardom had been an illusion. Levis told them to stick at it, and any lingering sorrow was drowned in a fe
w pints of ale.

  The Quarry Men had other bookings lined up. They’d been asked to play at the annual garden fete of their local Woolton church, St. Peter’s, on Saturday, July 6, and at the end of the Levis week, on June 22, they performed from the back of a flatbed coal lorry parked in Rosebery Street, Toxteth. At least three photographs were taken of them here—the first-ever images of John Lennon as a musician. He’s playing the Gallotone Champion guitar that Julia was still paying off, and wearing the checked shirt she’d bought him, and he’s singing/laughing into a microphone powered by a cable fed through the window of a house. A crowd has gathered to watch them and one of the faces is black: this is Liverpool 8, the West Indian neighborhood.37

  Nigel Walley has a memory of John changing the words to the songs he was singing, though he doesn’t recall which ones. It’s entirely believable. John on stage was doing to song lyrics what he did with poetry and prose: perverting the vocabulary, creating something funnier than the original, thinking on his feet, performing not only the music but humor to go with it. “Part of me would sooner have been a comedian,” he acknowledged when aged 40, “I just don’t have the guts to stand up and do it.”38 Curiously, changing the words while singing was also a trick of Alf Lennon’s; though John is unlikely to have known it, his talent was a hairyloom.

  None of this activity during the Quarry Bank exam period seemed to faze Rod or Eric, who did well in the O-Levels. In fact, it didn’t derail John either, who effortlessly succeeded in doing just what he’d planned: nothing whatever. Though the results wouldn’t be known until August, everyone at Quarry Bank knew that John Lennon was, as his despised Maths teacher K. I. Lishman had prophesied, “on the road to failure.” So how would he be filling his days after July? John himself still had no idea and no plans. But, without his knowledge, his future was being shaped at this very time by an interested party, an empathetic soul who’d been moved to tears of laughter by John’s still-circulating comic paper Daily Howl.

  Philip Burnett, John’s English master, was one of that ever-welcome breed of teachers able to spot talent where others see only trouble. John’s stock among the Quarry Bank masters was set low but Burnett wasn’t like his colleagues. After graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, where his tutor was C. S. Lewis, he’d worked at a school in Paris before joining Quarry Bank at 26. Burnett’s girlfriend June Harry, a 20-year-old student at Liverpool College of Art, first saw him when he was reading Yeats’ poetry in the Studio Club, just off Slater Street. “His dress sense was shabby traditional, and he had a penchant for carousing with ladies of dubious virtue in dock road pubs,” she says. “He was as rebellious as it was possible to be for a young middle-class man whose dad was still in holy orders. He was 27 and a frustrated artist, and he was kind to a fault.”39

  One bright warm evening in the summer of 1957 the lovers met at Ye Cracke, a little pub near the art college, and Burnett produced from his pocket a crumpled collection of confiscated cartoons and writings by “a Quarry Bank boy.” He spread them out on the table. Did June, he wondered, think their creator merited a place at the art college?

  I was intrigued by what I saw. They weren’t academic drawings but hilarious and quite disturbing cartoons. The one which has stayed with me ever since was of an elderly granny pushing a pram. But the pram wasn’t normal—the hood was oversize, presumably to accommodate the enormous misshapen head of the unseen horror heaving under a quilt. The caption was “Be a good boy cuddles, we’ll soon be home.” John explored this idea a few times—I later saw a similar cartoon with the caption “Oochie-coochie Raymond” only this time a grizzly old granny was leaning over the pram. I thought they showed an original sense of humor not unlike our own.

  Phil enjoyed John’s slant on life. He told me, “He’s a bit of a one-off. He’s bright enough, but not much apart from music and doing his cartoons interests him.” “So then he’s just right for art college,” I said, and Phil looked pleased, [saying] “It could be the making of him.”

  * * *

  * A tea-chest bass was played on the Vipers’ hit recording, bringing this homemade instrument mass attention for the first time.

  † Ian also went to George Harrison’s house once or twice, to show him some chords: “He invited me round because he knew I’d done this with Paul.”

  ‡ No dates are known for any of these bookings. (And this was the word generally used when a group had an engagement to play somewhere; “gig” or “gigs” was not yet in common parlance. The pronunciation is worth mentioning too: in Liverpool, as book is like “bewk” so booking is like “boo-king,” with an equal stress on the final letter.)

  § Levis didn’t use a “clapometer” to measure the strength of audience reaction—this device was deployed solely (in later years) by Hughie Green, yet another self-important and insincere Canadian “starmaker” based in Britain.

  SIX

  JULY 6, 1957

  COME GO WITH ME

  The Evening Express headlined it the way British newspapers must: PHEW! AGAIN TODAY MERSEYSIDE SIZZLES. It had been the hottest June in south Liverpool since records began in 1939, and on Saturday, July 6—as John Lennon had forecast in his Daily Howl—the weather was muggy (if not followed by tuggy and weggy). Inevitably, complainers about winter cold were griping about the heat.

  Lonnie Donegan was top of the NME chart again, with a live recording of “Putting on the Style” from the London Palladium. He was now a fixture of British light entertainment, elevated from the grassroots scene his “Rock Island Line” had inspired. Quite how many skiffle groups were active in the summer of 1957 was, it seems, everyone’s guess. Between four and five hundred in the London area alone, the press reckoned. No one really knew the true number, or ever will, but five thousand groups for the whole of Britain might be about right, something like twenty to thirty thousand players, many of them using instruments that could have come from the rubbish tip. “There’s a lively indiscipline and lack of inhibition about skiffle that exactly suits the moods of this generation,” reflected The World’s Fair, while the Observer pondered skiffle’s popularity more broadly and concluded with a telling question: “The remarkable thing is that in an age of high-fidelity sound, long-players and tape recorders, the young should suddenly decide to make their own music. It is fantastic. What are they going to do with all those guitars when the craze ends?”1

  What indeed. For the majority of skifflers, rock and roll was of at least equal appeal. The many church committees that benevolently acceded to teenagers’ desires that summer and booked skiffle groups for fetes and garden parties were unwittingly inviting that most feared of beasts through the door. St. Peter’s church in Woolton was happy to accommodate the Quarry Men in its grounds and hall, not realizing their leader would be shouting the music of the devil.

  There was, suddenly, plenty of it about. The NME Top Thirty at the end of June 1957 included for the first time together Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, added to which there was already a buzz about the British release (on Friday, July 5) of “Bye Bye Love,” the present number 2 in America, by a new duo called the Everly Brothers. The young were beginning to get a grip on the music scene.

  John Lennon bought (or “slap leathered”) Elvis’s “All Shook Up” c/w “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” as well as that new one by Little Richard, “Lucille” c/w “Send Me Some Lovin’.” Of all the great records made by Richard in the first flush of a long career, “Lucille” could be the best, swept along by an irresistibly insistent piano, guitar and sax riff and crowned by a vocal of fabulous emotional intensity. Paul McCartney loved “Lucille” right away, and it too went straight into the “Little Richard act” he would burst into, unbidden, at any moment.

  Paul had an arrangement this Saturday, invited by his Institute friend Ivan Vaughan to accompany him to Woolton’s church fete. “Ivy” said a couple of his friends were playing in a skiffle group, and of course there was the perpetual hope of picking up a girl. Despite t
he sweltering weather, that white sports coat got another airing.

  The fete began with a procession, leaving the church and finding its way back there by a circuitous route around the village. The line was headed by a brass band, followed by marching Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, Brownies and Cubs, with decorated flatbed lorries for the other attractions led by the new Rose Queen (flanked by attendants and boy soldiers in uniform); her crowning was to begin the main festivities at 3PM. Aboard the final lorry, as far from the brass band as possible, were the Quarry Men, bookending the experience of the Vipers fifty-one Saturdays before, in July 1956, when they’d trundled around the streets of Soho singing what became “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O.” Just as the Vipers had grown tired of trying to compete acoustically with all the engine noise, so too did the Quarry Men: Rod Davis’s father took photos of the procession as it passed his house on Kings Drive and the Quarry Men are sitting around on chairs.

  In Soho in 1956, the Vipers had jumped from their lorry outside the 2i’s Coffee Bar and, playing a couple of numbers inside, unwittingly started the skiffle craze. The direct consequence was the Quarry Men at Woolton in 1957. And when they got down from their lorry at the church, in the field where they were playing beyond the cemetery, John Lennon was watched by Paul McCartney and it was the start of everything else.

  After Paul cycled over from Allerton, he and Ivy walked up the hill to the church, Paul feeling hip (and hot) in his coat and specially narrowed trousers, Ivy explaining the makeup of the group and who Paul would be meeting. As they paid their threppence admission they could hear the Quarry Men playing and went straight up to see them. Here, then, were Ivan’s friends—and, right off, the singer had it. He looked strong and assertive, clearly the leader, cool in his checked red and white shirt. Paul, the keen guitarist, watched the fingers and couldn’t work out what chords he was playing, not yet realizing they were banjo chords. And also he noticed the song … “He was singing ‘Come Go with Me,’ which I thought was fabulous until I realized they weren’t the right words. He was changing them. ‘Come go with me … down to the penitentiary’—he was nicking folk-song words and chain-gang words and putting them into the Dell-Vikings’ song, a clever little bit of ingenuity.”2