Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  As George knew several more guitar chords than John or Paul, every time he showed them a new one they tried to write a song around it36—and it was in this period, possibly at Upton Green, that Paul wrote one he called “In Spite of All the Danger,” a chugging and melodic country-flavored number with a couple of extended lead guitar solos created by George. For this reason, the song was a unique deviation from the Lennon-McCartney credit: it went down as McCartney-Harrison.

  The tune of “In Spite of All the Danger” was entirely Paul’s, but it leaned heavily on the melody of Elvis’s “Trying to Get to You,” a song that includes the lyric “[in] spite of all that I’ve been through.” Using an existing song as inspiration for the writing of another is standard practice, but the rock and roll era was already littered with outrageous examples of plagiarism seemingly free of legal action—possibly because the song being copied was not entirely original to that composer either.

  Paul was now in full flow as a songwriter, keeping an ear cocked for any interesting phrases or sayings he could work into a new piece, not just thinking like a songwriter but thinking he was thinking like a songwriter, conscious of the process, seeing himself in a bigger picture. It was probably in this period that he seized on a catchphrase while out with George one evening at the pictures. One of the commercials was for Link furniture (“combine contemporary good looks with ageless glamour”) and it ended with the tagline “Are you thinking of linking?” “I came out of there [thinking] ‘That should be a song … thinking of linking, people are going to get married, got to do that.’ But I could never really get past ‘thinking of linking can only be done by two’—pretty corny.”37

  Going to the pictures was something they all did, as regularly as pocket money would permit, always provided that Paul was able to talk his dad into letting him out when he should have been revising for his O-Levels. They went in combinations and sometimes as a trio; one film they saw together was Violent Playground, the juvenile delinquency drama shot in Liverpool in summer 1957 and which opened there the following March. The main character was Johnny and one of the screen lines was “What’s it tonight, Johnny?” This was grabbed by John, Paul and George and, over time, became bastardized into “Where we going, Johnny?,” spoken with an exaggerated American whine. It was their catchphrase, voiced not only when they were wondering where to go, but at any time, in any circumstance.

  As well as George’s house, or Paul’s house (if Jim was out), and occasionally Mendips, John and Paul also had some “eyeball to eyeball” sessions at Julia’s. Like all John’s other friends before him, Paul fell in love with her, finding her more like a big sister than a friend’s mum. “I always thought she was a very beautiful lady, with long red hair. I know John absolutely adored her: one, on the level that she was his mum, but also because she was a very beautiful woman and a very spirited woman. She was very lively.” Paul thought it was fabulous that she played banjo, finding her “great, gorgeous and funny.” While observing John’s awkward relationship with Twitchy, Paul could see how much he loved his mother—John “idol-worshipped her,” and when they left the house “there was always a tinge of sadness” about him. Louise Harrison overheard John saying to Paul at her house one day, “I don’t know how you can sit there and act normal with your mother dead. If anything like that happened to me I’d go off me head.”38

  The more Paul and John played guitar, sometimes with Julia and her banjo close at hand, the more they realized how they shared a liking for old songs too, like the 1920s standards she’d taught John a couple of years previously, “Ramona,” “Little White Lies” and “Girl of My Dreams,” and “Don’t Blame Me” (written 1933). Paul knew more of these tunes than John and shared some of the treasures. Both were inspired by the way some had unique introductions, a preliminary that didn’t recur in the piece. Though rock and roll was first, second and third in Lennon-McCartney’s list of obsessions, they snuck up their sleeve this other dimension to their musical knowledge and interest.

  By this time, John was in the third and final term of his first year at Liverpool College of Art. From a work point of view, he rarely did more than the least he could get away with, and with minimal application. As fellow student Bill Harry says, “John’s strength was his spontaneity. If he did something, that was it—he’d scribble something down in maybe thirty seconds and that was all it needed. If he spent four hours doing the thing he wouldn’t make it better, he’d make it worse.”39

  Distractions were positively sought, and John’s first real art school relationship happened in the summer term. Mona Harris, a year older, went out with John for a few weeks while her real boyfriend was away at university in London—and his return in July brought it to an end. They enjoyed good times in the interim. “John took me to meet his mother,” she says. “I remember her as small and lively, a real character, as full of wit and repartee as John was, and they sparked verbally. But we weren’t there long because there was lots of washing hanging up to dry, all her young daughters’ clothes around the place, and John said, ‘We’re not stopping, it smells like old knickers here.’ ”40

  By some distance, friendships were the most attractive aspect of art school life for John. He and Tony Carricker gravitated toward each other on the basis of a shared love of music. As Tony puts it, “Early rock freaks found each other like drug takers will find each other.” He still recalls their first conversation, as they walked down the hill into town: “It was like an interrogation: ‘Have you got this?’ ‘Have you heard that?’ ‘Oh, you’ve got that, have you?’—it was like being vetted. I was in.”41 Tony had “Bloodshot Eyes” by Wynonie Harris, he had red label Vogue 78s, he introduced John to Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Want to Dance,” he had country blues and he loved Chuck Berry; when John found out Tony had memorized all the words of “Roll Over Beethoven” he got him to write them down for him. He recalls overhearing John saying to somebody, “He’s got all the records!”

  Tony was one of those enthusiasts not merely prepared to accept whatever was available in the local shops but to seek out scarce sounds. He was a gatherer, hungry to expand his knowledge. He’d discovered that the cultural department of the American Embassy in London loaned Smithsonian Institution and other rare records free to applicants, on trust. Packages containing discs by Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Willie Johnson, Sleepy John Estes and other such fabulously exotic creatures, remarkable field recordings from the American South and rare studio sessions of the 1920s to 1940s, would be dispatched via Royal Mail from Grosvenor Square to Tony’s tiny house in Widnes, the return postage prepaid.

  Though John was indebted to Tony for broadening his musical horizons, Tony gained most from the friendship. “I was an acolyte of John’s, it was an acolytish relationship, because he had the personality. He was very much a force of nature—he was frightened of far fewer things than most people, he had no social fears, wasn’t constrained by all the silly little things in life and had tremendous self-confidence and good fun. He was a very, very good mate.”

  All the friendships in John’s life were like this: he was the leader, respected and gratefully followed by others. But perhaps for the first time here at college there was an exception: John found a friend he revered. Being John, his choice was unconventional. Jeff Mahomed‖ was seven years his senior, a tall, bulky, swarthy man with tightly curled hair and sideburns. Born and raised just south of Manchester, he had a moneyed and exotic background: an Indian father and Italian-French mother from the Vatican City. He’d been to boarding school and then completed a stint of National Service done the hard way, as a military policeman for the Commonwealth forces fighting insurrection in Malaya. Though his artistic talent was obvious, why Jeff Mahomed had enrolled at Liverpool College of Art remained a mystery to everyone. On the smallest of grants, he lived in a squalid basement flat in Liverpool 8, seemingly without other friends, racked by ruinous self-doubt, eating in the cheapest cafés, walking around in an old tweed co
at not quite big enough for the job, collar turned against the cold and damp, hands thrust in pockets, feet wet from leaky shoes, a man who picked up cigarette butts from the gutter.42

  George and Paul met Jeff. George would recall a man who “looked like an Arab and talked like a German and was tanned all over.” It’s not clear if they fully understood the complexity of John and Jeff’s friendship. Ann Mason is sure John looked up to him as a father figure, which isn’t inconceivable. In mid-1958, when John was coming up to 18, Jeff was rising 25 and going on 40; the younger man was desperate to experience everything and it seemed the elder man had. Another contemporary, Pat Jourdan, likens the relationship to uncle and nephew and is sure John was surprised Jeff had accepted him. “He found his feet courtesy of Jeff,” she says.a

  Visits to Jackson’s art shop brought these students opposite a newly opened coffee bar at 23 Slater Street, one of the first in Liverpool and a venue that evidently catered to the city’s more bohemian types. In the daytime, the Jacaranda was a standard ground-floor snack bar—tea, frothy espresso, beans on toast, bacon butties—but at night its downstairs area (a former coal cellar) became a separate enterprise, the Jacaranda Club, a members-only establishment. Its owner, Allan Williams, the son of one of Liverpool’s oldest established dance promoters, had struck up a friendship with Tom Littlewood, day-to-day manager of the 2i’s Coffee Bar in London, who’d explained how a coffee bar could register as a private club with a membership list and so stay open well beyond midnight.

  Though unlicensed for alcohol, the Jacaranda—or “the Jac” as it quickly became known—was always buzzing, Williams providing some unusual entertainment. He’d formed a good friendship with Trinidad-born Harold Phillips, one of the thousands of West Indians who sailed into Britain after the war. Phillips was leader of the Royal Caribbean Steel Band and Williams gave them a residency in the Jac, the sound of their eight forty-gallon steel oil-drums throbbing up the stairs and through the streets. Like all good calypsonians, Phillips adopted a noble moniker, this one chosen after his brand of cigarette: he was Lord Woodbine. Being Liverpool, the appellation was soon shortened, to Woody. “The Jacaranda was a social revolution,” says Allan Williams, “and great for anyone who worked anti-social hours, like nurses and people in the entertainment business. Villains generally steered clear because there was no booze and most of the people were intellectual conversationalists; they realized it wasn’t their scene.”43

  It was the scene of the city’s art students. It was bound to be, because Allan and his wife Beryl, still in their twenties, were bohemians themselves. Society had shifted them to the edge because of their mixed-race marriage: he was white Liverpool-Welsh (born in Bootle, with a Welsh family background), she was born in Liverpool to Chinese parents, the daughter of a laundryman. Though Liverpool is often described as a melting-pot, Allan and Beryl ran up against open hostility; both sets of parents were against their marriage, and, says Allan, when out together in the street they were spat on and had to endure taunts like “Oh look at him with that Chink.”

  Allan was a City & Guilds–qualified plumber and Beryl a schoolteacher; they married in 1955 and soon afterward went youth hosteling around Europe. At the same time as Alan Sytner was drawing inspiration from a Paris jazz club to open the Cavern, Allan and Beryl were in the same area of the Left Bank, the students’ quarter, looking at cafés and clubs and pondering their own move. Back in Liverpool, Allan jacked in the plumbing, cashed in his insurance and opened the Jacaranda, launching himself into a colorful and highly eventful life as an entrepreneur. He had the basement decorated with vivid murals by two art school students, Rod Murray and Stuart Sutcliffe, who were paid in bottles of gin, baked beans on toast and coffee; Allan and Beryl rapidly established a close friendship with Sutcliffe, an intense and quite brilliant young art student.

  John Lennon went to the Jacaranda to spend whatever remained of Mimi’s weekly allowance. Paul and George and some of their friends went there too, though less often. At lunchtimes and in the late afternoons, the place was abuzz with college students, and much of their talk was of politics. In Pete Seeger’s words, this was now the Frightened Fifties, the early years of the Cold War, a highly political time. The word “beatnik” was coined on April 2, 1958, by the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and it soon jumped the Atlantic where the press liberally and pejoratively applied it to any young antiwar activist, layabout, bohemian, beardie, poet, writer, reader of beat novels or idler, and to most members of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, inaugurated in February 1958. (Some beatniks were actually all these things.) The Bomb was the single hottest and most divisive issue of the time, and a fifty-mile protest march by CND members, from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, took place over the Easter holiday weekend in April. It received a very mixed press, and because antiwar songs were strummed by a few of the protesters the guitar was mentioned in dispatches. Whether used for rock or peace, the instrument was seldom out of the headlines. In the hands of a rock and roller the guitar meant delinquency; in the hands of a beatnik it meant, to some, a threat like a gun.

  Though John Lennon had become a college student at this revolutionary time, he showed no interest in engaging in any radical activities, in no peace or anti-Bomb protests. He’d arrived at his conclusions and that was that—no time for fussing or fighting, no need for further discussion.

  In Britain, the nuclear issue went hand in hand with feelings of anti-Americanism, now rising steadily again to build on years of slow-burning postwar resentment, but America’s front-line defense was always Britain’s young. As John put it eight years later, “America [was] the big youth place in everybody’s imagination—America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.”44 In the eyes of British kids, the States was a milk and honey land of skyscrapers, cowboys, Cadillacs, Elvis, hamburgers, fabulous clothes, Hollywood, Little Richard, funny place names, Coca-Cola, Buddy Holly, wide prairies, Chuck Berry, DC comics and the very best sounds. In Liverpool especially, where American jeans, belts, boots, cowboy shirts and records were brought in by returning seamen, it was hard to find a young person with a bad word to say about the place.

  The Quarry Men played on through the spring, picking up the odd date (and some of them were very odd) but no longer working the circuits of old. Again, as no bookings were advertised in the Echo, no dates are known. There is another photo, however, showing John, Paul and George standing with their guitars, Arthur Kelly in the background. Colin Hanton remembers it being taken after a booking in a Speke school, and that he was off to the side, dismantling his kit in a post-argument sulk. It was taken soon after Mike McCartney’s color photo, so George is still much smaller than John or Paul. Their matching stage outfit this time is white cowboy (western) shirts with black shoulders and white tasseled fringes. Everyone liked them, and Arthur remembers George saying he felt really good in his. They were obtained by Nigel Walley from a personal contact at a credit drapery shop—take now, pay later; but in spring 1958 Nigel was diagnosed with traces of TB and went into a sanatorium, and without his prompting, and to his acute personal embarrassment, the shirts were neither paid for nor returned.

  This illness marked the end of Walley’s tenure as manager of the Quarry Men. John and Paul visited him once or twice at the sanatorium, he says, taking their guitars for a sing-song around the bed, but while he stayed John’s friend, as he’d been since the age of five, he walked away from the group … and without his endeavor on their behalf the bookings evaporated.

  In their last shows, John and Paul were still side by side on the front line, eager to grab all the attention for themselves, singing together or backing each other. They didn’t give George much of a look in. As John said, “Paul and I really carved up the empire between us—we were [the] singers. George didn’t sing when we brought him into the group. He was a guitarist. We maybe let him do one number—like ‘and here he is …’—but Paul and I did all the singing.”45
Duff Lowe remembers these final bookings taking place on Saturday nights in “various social clubs in the area. If we got paid it was very small, £1 each or less. I never took it that seriously. But Paul and John always gave it 120 percent, it had to be perfect.”

  It was at this time that John decided the Quarry Men should make a record, and the others needed no persuading—just 3s 6d each. This time the answer to “Where we going, Johnny?” was 38 Kensington, where one Percy F. Phillips ran probably Liverpool’s only recording studio and record press. It may be that George told him about it, because Johnny Byrne and Paul Murphy of the Texans cut a two-sided 78rpm disc here in 1957 and George probably heard it during the Morgue period. However they knew of it, the setting was appropriate. Elvis, Carl and Jerry Lee recorded for Sam Phillips in Memphis, John, Paul and George recorded for Percy Phillips in Liverpool.46

  It was the five of them: John, Paul and George with their guitars (John and Paul acoustic, George using a pickup through Paul’s Elpico amp), Colin with his drums, Duff on the studio piano. Though all the recording and disc-cutting gear was professional, it wasn’t at all like the studios in The Girl Can’t Help It and Jailhouse Rock: it was the small downstairs middle living room of a house in a Victorian terrace near a parade of shops on a main road. Traffic noise was dampened by curtains and carpets. The session cannot be dated with any certainty because the group’s name doesn’t show in the studio logbook, save for a note on the inside cover that reads merely “Arthur Kelly of Quarrymen.” A plaque above the door of the house, unveiled in 2005, gives a precise session date of (Monday) July 14, 1958, but how this was arrived at has never been convincingly demonstrated; it could have been a month or two earlier.

  Recollections of almost every aspect of the session are strewn with contradictions, but it seems probable they paid 17s 6d for a double-sided ten-inch disc, 78rpm, and recorded both sides straight to acetate to save what would have been an extra 2s 6d to go via tape.b Both recordings are live, the sounds captured by a single microphone suspended from the ceiling, balance nonexistent. But it was a record! On what they considered the A-side they did “That’ll Be the Day,” an appropriate salute to the Crickets for the song and sound that had changed everything, and on the other they did “In Spite of All the Danger,” the composer credit—handwritten in ink under the title—saying “McCartney, Harrison.”