It very much helped George’s situation that he could join Paul in finally eradicating John’s banjo leanings, and share with him that most hotly sought-after commodity: new chords. It made quite a difference to John’s playing—“All I ever wanted to do was to vamp, then George and Paul came along and taught me other things,” he’d recall. And as George said, he didn’t have to beg to join the Quarry Men: “I was asked by John to join the group—I didn’t twist his arm. He was very friendly with me; John and I had a good relationship from very early on.”3
In interviews, John generally focused on another aspect of the relationship, making it plain that the age gap bothered him, and that he struggled for some time to overcome it.
He was a kid who played guitar and he was a friend of Paul’s … I didn’t dig him on first sight. George looked even younger than Paul, and Paul looked about ten with his baby face. He came round once and asked me to go to the pictures with him but I pretended I was busy … I couldn’t be bothered with him, he used to follow me around like a bloody kid, hanging around all the time. It took me years to come round to him, to start considering him as an equal.4
Despite this frank if uncharitable purge of his feelings, John did want George in the group, seeing not only guitar skills but other attributes. George was cool. He dressed as an individual and often to shock, to goad reactions—usually admiration from his peers and dismay from adults. He could be quiet, and sometimes grumpy, but he was always honest and never intimidated or afraid, standing up for himself verbally and physically. “He was cocky,” Paul would say, admiringly. “He had a great sense of himself. He wasn’t cowed by anything.”5 When (not if) John aimed volleys of verbal missiles in his direction, George could fire back his own, and John saw and welcomed that this kid, though so much younger and smaller, was no pushover.
George’s first impression of John, as recalled in a handwritten questionnaire five years later, was “He doesn’t get his hair cut either.” John was correct to see idolatry in George’s attitude because, as George said, he was happy for it to be noticed. “I was very impressed by John. Probably more than Paul, or I showed it more. I loved John’s blue jeans and lilac shirt and sidies. He was very sarcastic, always trying to bring you down, but I either took no notice or gave him the same back, and it worked.”6
With Lennon as leader, humor within the ranks was crucial; being able to sing and play was one asset, capacity to have a laff and a shout another, and those who didn’t join in—like the dour Eric Griffiths—were exposed and could be ridiculed without much mercy.* The personalities had to dovetail, and in George’s case it was an instant fit. Though often pointed, his wit was dressed in an endearing tone—wry, dry and droll—and he was an original thinker. It was a Liverpool humor, like theirs and plenty others’ around. George was often funny and sometimes quite devastating; he delivered a line with a most unusual quality—a razor-sharp slowness—and his timing was almost as good as John’s, whose comic timing was just sensational, the match of any great comedian. Much more so than John and Paul, George had a distinctive accent, not the full Scouse but semi, a wash of Wavertree with a smattering of Speke, and in combination with his delivery the result was victorious.
John and Paul’s shared sense of fun was already strong, and laughing at cruelty was a big part of it. As Paul says, “That was the kind of thing that separated us from other people. It meant we had our own world. A world of black humor and of nervousness at other people’s afflictions.”7 Though the time frame will never be known, it didn’t take George long to tune in, vamping in the shorthand wit, sourcing laughs from everything amusing and unkind and often unseen by others. The door of their private in-joke circle opened to admit one new member and then slammed shut again.
George’s joining also gave the relationships a whole new complexity. The chain—John brought in Paul, Paul brought in George—would never be unimportant or forgotten in all the years to come. Paul, to his credit, had recognized that young George was hip enough to risk introducing to John. On the other hand, while John was automatically revered by both of them—“It was teenage hero worship,” Paul has said8—Paul continued to remind George of their own age gap, that “nine months younger” status. George had no one to lord it over, nor did he bother to jostle shoulder to shoulder with John and Paul on the front line, but he did expect—and, when necessary, demand—to be considered an equal … and was. In this group, John got his way by being boss and shouting louder (as the others said of him several times), Paul got it by charm or calculation, George got it almost unnoticed, but got it all the same.
Now that George was in the Quarry Men, Arthur Kelly fell into their circle too. He’d come to know Paul quite well in the preceding months but hadn’t met John until the day he and George were in Vaughan’s, buying a bag of scallops.
George and I were in the chippy one dinner-time when this Ted came in, his hair greased up the sides, a pale colored sports jacket, black shirt, jeans, a big army belt and what we called chukka boots, like desert boots. He looked so fucking hard that I must admit I physically stepped back. And George just said, “Oh, this is John.” But he was nice. He just looked hard: that nose and that look. All the other art school students had beards and sandals, typical bohemian, and John was so different.9
Though Kelly also played guitar, there was no suggestion he’d be invited to join the group. This was fine with him, he didn’t have their need to do it, but he did start going around with them, getting in free at halls because he was “with the group,” maybe carrying a guitar. Right from the start, Arthur noticed how George’s humor integrated with John’s and Paul’s.
One time, they were playing a hall in Garston, one of those nights when you had to run like fuck at the end, with the instruments, because a gang of Teds had taken umbrage over something—probably the way their girls were eyeing up John and Paul. Paul was with a girlfriend this night who had huge tits. In those days we used to tap the end of a cigarette before we smoked it, and George tapped his on her tits. She didn’t seem to be offended and we all completely fell apart. Tap-tap-tap on these enormous great sticky-out tits.10
The Quarry Men lineup remained as fluid as ever. It seems Colin Hanton was now in and out, playing at some bookings and not others, which may mean they went without a drummer occasionally; and around the same time George joined them they also got a pianist. This was John Lowe, two months older than Paul and in the same Removes class at Liverpool Institute. After first running the idea by John, Paul made the approach in the school playground: “Do you want to join our group?” His full name was John Charles Duff Lowe and, inevitably, everyone called him Duff. As a piano player he was anything but, as Paul recalls: “Duff was in[vited to join] because of that arpeggio at the front of ‘Mean Woman Blues.’ He could play it great. No other pianist we knew could play an arpeggio, you had to be trained to do that. We could all play a chord but we couldn’t keep it going all the way up.”11
It was now spring 1958, and their sound was changing: skiffle was out and Buddy was in, along with Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Carl and Elvis. Though Len Garry seems to have floated around the scene a while longer, as a friend of John and schoolmate of Paul, and maybe sometimes he played something, there was little need now for his tea-chest. Duff only played if they knew the venue had a piano on stage. He also had a strict dad who prescribed an unmissable return time, so even when he did play he often had to leave before they’d finished. The others would turn around, wondering why they weren’t hearing piano in a particular song, and the stool would be vacant. Having left his departure as late as possible, Lowe was running up the street for the crosstown bus back to West Derby.
Paul saw to it that the addition of a lead guitarist and pianist meant a period of proper rehearsal, the like of which they hadn’t had for some time. The obvious venue was his house because Duff could use Jim Mac’s piano. Boys would be drawn to Allerton on a Sunday afternoon from Speke, Woolton and West Derby as if by magnet, and the same thing
was also happening in many other houses all over the city. Jim had to accept these visits to his house by John, which Paul had managed to talk him into, but it’s likely he was still unaware the bad lad was popping over during the week and that Paul was sagging off school for their productive “eyeball to eyeball” songwriting sessions, turning out those Lennon-McCartney Originals. Colin Hanton didn’t usually come to those Sunday rehearsals because Jim was concerned the drum noise would penetrate the walls of the terraced house. Even without them, Duff had a recollection of Jim “sitting at the end of the piano and waving his arms if we got too loud.”12
With his deep musical interest and knowledge, Jim found some involvement irresistible. He felt there wasn’t enough melody in rock and roll and suggested—possibly several times—the group add “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” to their repertoire, something George would always recall with amusement. Jim liked George. Though there appeared to be no reason why he should favor him over John, both being dressed as Teddy Boys, history played its part: Paul and George had been friends for some time, and a friendly rapport had been established between child and adult—George called him “Uncle Jim” and the older man found the youngster’s impudence attractive. George wasn’t going to influence Paul the same way John did, which was the prime reason Jim maintained his stand against the older lad. In fact, it went much further, as John discovered some time afterward. “[Paul’s] dad was always trying to get me out of the group behind me back, I found out later. He’d say to George, ‘Why don’t you get rid of John, he’s just a lot of trouble’ [and also] ‘Cut your hair nice and wear baggy trousers,’ like I was the bad influence because I was the eldest and usually had all the gear first.”13
It can only have been to Jim’s vexation that when Ian Harris asked his cousin Paul to round up some friends and perform at his wedding reception, this meant that Lennon would be at a McCartney family party. Ian was married in a Catholic church in Huyton on Saturday March 8, 1958, and the party took place at his parents’ house, a detached property at 147 Dinas Lane—the biggest house in the McCartney family. Ian was 19 and his bride Jackie 16, so it was appropriate that “teenage music” was among the entertainment, and all to the good that a cousin and his mates should provide it. They played in the dining room at the back of the house (“the back parlor”) and it may have been George’s first “public” appearance with them. Mike McCartney, only 14, took an invaluable color photograph as they played—the earliest (and, for four more years, only) color shot of John, Paul and George.
Courtesy of Mike’s application, so much is visible. Most striking is George’s youth. He is indeed a boy, not even a young man. And yet, just eleven days beyond his 15th birthday, he has a quality that has brought him the company of elders—a triumphant act in itself. His thick hair has been brushed up all around and is set strong, Vaseline or sugar water enabling it to defy gravity; he also has splayed ears (of which he was self-conscious), dirty fingernails and a teenager’s pustule in the middle of his chin.
George’s Hofner President is evidently a quality instrument, and Paul’s Zenith looks good, but John’s guitar is clearly nasty (if not cheap). Performing in front of his beloved family, Paul’s eyebrows are raised in the act of vocal expression. Again, there is uniformity of dress—a further indication of Paul’s smart thinking about presentation, and also how very quickly George had joined their fold. All three are wearing light bluish sports jackets and black ties; John and Paul have identical blue shirts, George (who can’t have had blue) is in white or pink. John is standing in the corner, farthest from Mike’s lens; his hair is slicked up, and, without glasses, he has the look familiar to those who knew him: the young man who can hardly see a thing. His cheeks are flushed red—which, Paul maintains, is because John was “bevvied.”14
In which case, this was probably a testing occasion for Paul. His family would have heard by now about the new friend, the troublemaker, and been watching him with particular attention. At the same time, as people in John’s world were beginning to discover with some unease, John Lennon could be a horrible drunk, shedding the humor that vitally checked his roughest edges to become verbally abusive and physically aggressive, an unadulterated obnoxious pain in the backside. What a risk this was for Paul; he may have needed to keep John pacified in front of his aunties, uncles and cousins and the bride’s family. Not that John would have been the only one “aled up” here—it was a Liverpool party after all, famously steamy and frequently troublesome occasions.
While the photo seems to show only three musicians—John, Paul and George—when viewed at its widest extent, full frame, Mike also caught the headstock of an acoustic guitar by George’s right elbow—a fourth player. It may have been the other Quarry Men guitarist Eric Griffiths. It’s unlikely Duff or Colin was present, and no one can say how long they played. Buddy and Elvis are sure to have featured strongly.
The photo also reveals one further detail: Paul has bought a pickup for his Zenith. Though there’s no trailing wire (so he wasn’t using it on this occasion), he bought it when he got his first amplifier, a small green Elpico AC-55, which he recalls buying from the electrical store Curry’s. Made of Bakelite, and capable of throwing out ten watts, it had a carrying handle and was, as he’d describe it, “rather like a small green suitcase.”15 For the first time, one of the Quarry Men is electric.
If that is Eric on the extreme of Mike McCartney’s color photo, it was a portent, for he was about to be edged out completely. George had walked into the Quarry Men and coolly wondered, what are all these people doing here? “It was daft: they had no proper drummer but about eighteen guitarists, and people coming along for one night and not again … who didn’t seem to be doing anything, so I said, ‘Let’s get rid of them’ … I conspired to get rid of Griff.”16
It says a great deal for John’s leadership style—a kind of benign maneuvering—that he’d allowed Paul to suggest the addition of George and Duff, and now he let the new and youngest boy (“a bloody kid”) wield the ax over a founder member, John’s old Quarry Bank schoolfriend.
Without telling Eric it was his only chance of staying, John and Paul first asked him to buy the hot new instrument on the scene, an electric bass guitar. Few groups had one, so the Quarry Men’s stock would rise considerably if he said yes. It would mean buying not only the guitar but also an amplifier. Pretty much everyone in Liverpool and elsewhere bought goods by hire-purchase: a certain sum of money paid “down” (right away) and the balance over a period of time—people called it “buying on the never-never,” “on the knocker” or “on the drip.” Even allowing for this, the bass and an amp represented real outlay, and Eric, who didn’t have the cash, was unwilling to saddle his mum with the debt. He didn’t know it, but he was signing his marching orders.
When it came down to it, neither John (whose group it was) nor Paul (implicit in the decision) nor George (who’d set the ball rolling) had the desire to sack Eric to his face. This, they decided, was the job of the manager. Says Nigel Walley:
I was called to a meeting at John’s house. It was John, Paul and me, and they said I had to go and get rid of Eric. It was “You’re the manager, so you’ve got to go and tell him. That’s what you get paid for, that’s why you get an equal share.”
OK, Eric didn’t fit into the situation. He had no personality whatsoever. You couldn’t crack a smile out of him. He couldn’t help it, that’s the way he was. He’d play but never smile, whereas the others had the vim and vigor.
I went either to Eric’s house or a Woolton coffee bar, I can’t now remember which, and broke the news to him. He was very upset—he said he was part of the group so why would they get rid of him? It was a sad day for him and for me: he thought I’d instigated it and never forgave me. They’d just sent the messenger boy out, and that was it. John and Paul never got in touch with him themselves.17
The Quarry Men was now John, Paul, George, Duff (when a venue had a piano) and Colin (if they told him what they we
re doing). The three guitarists were unimpressed with Colin’s drumming and he would have been out too if a replacement was available, but one wasn’t. He was on a limb, though: Paul and George (and Duff) were in school together at the Institute and John was next door at the art college, so there was much to which Colin just wasn’t party. And Eric’s sacking had annoyed him: the two were friends; he’d joined the group through Eric.
For Nigel, having to dismiss someone was not at all what he was in this for. It had been a tough task, made all the more so by John and Paul’s attitude—particularly Paul’s, he says. He was bruised. While his “management” of the Quarry Men continued, he felt less and less enthused by it and his involvement began to ebb away.
For Paul and George, dinnertimes became a regular highlight of school life. The Institute and art school were separated by nothing more than two side doors; only a courtyard cluttered with broken easels and desks stood between them. Through the second door and they were into the building, then down the stairs and straight into the canteen, the hub of art school life. It was like entering another world. John was here wolfing down his food one day when through they came, to be exposed immediately for what they were: schoolboys in blazers, self-evidently (and self-consciously) so much younger than anyone else in the room. John’s friend Jon Hague remembers the first time it happened.
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