Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  Seventeen years later, without the advantage of hearing it in between times, John recalled what he could of the session: “The first thing we ever recorded was ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ the Buddy Holly song, and one of Paul’s called ‘In Spite of All the Danger.’ It cost us fifteen shillings and we made it in the front room of some guy’s house that he called a recording studio. It had all the equipment, and it was a 78. And I sang both sides. I was such a bully in those days I didn’t even let Paul sing his own song. That’s the actual first recording we ever made.”47

  The sound is rough, but here they are then, the Quarry Men. It is, again, unmistakably John Lennon’s voice on “That’ll Be the Day,” with Paul providing the “ah” backing and George taking the guitar solo. The harmonies work really well. They shave seven seconds off the Crickets’ version by going faster, probably through nerves. It isn’t brilliant and was never likely to be, but it is live and they get through it, and the only hiccups are the right ones, when John pays homage to Buddy’s distinctive vocal signature.

  John again sings lead on “In Spite of All the Danger,” Paul provides more fine harmonies throughout, and George adds an “ah” backing. It’s said Colin and Duff hadn’t heard the song before, and so were feeling their way through it, but it’s not solely for this reason that it plods somewhat. Though the debt to “Trying to Get to You” is clear, it’s still an original number and an interesting, attractive one at that, written by a boy of 15—a fantastic achievement. The B7 chord gleaned by Paul and George from that stranger way over town makes an appearance. The song is long: the lead guitar solo that Paul mistakenly believed merited George a cocomposer credit comes around not once but twice, so by the time they were done three and a half minutes had elapsed; anecdotes have Percy Phillips waving his arms at them, hurrying them to a finish, because he could see the disc-cutting lathe reaching its ultimate point, almost at the center label.48

  Paul says the entire session lasted a quarter of an hour, though what happened next is again unclear. In his only published interview about it, Percy Phillips said the group had just fifteen shillings, not the full 17s 6d, and someone (“I think it was John”) had to return a couple of days later with the other 2s 6d in order to collect the record.49 But Colin and Duff both have a clear memory of the five of them standing together on Kensington that day, holding the prized disc in their hands and just gazing at it. None of them could quite believe their eyes. Black gold. Duff also has an extra memory: that Percy Phillips popped the disc into a sleeve for protection, from a Parlophone record.

  Equal owners, they agreed to divvy the disc around. John had it first (of course), then Paul and George, and Colin and Duff got it later. Others also had it for a while—a friend of Duff’s kept it for a bit, and Tony Carricker swears he had it for a long time in 1959: he used it as collateral to get back from John an Elvis LP he’d loaned him. Somehow or other, though, it ended up with Duff.50

  The record “That’ll Be the Day” c/w “In Spite of All the Danger” is the culmination of an era for the Quarry Men, the end of the road for now. It’s not representative of their sound at any time other than this moment, which was a long way from the rough skiffle scuffle of tea-chest bass, washboard and banjo that was its start. Where once the group had been John’s schoolboy gang, now it was John, Paul and George and a couple of others. Duff left Liverpool Institute in July and scarcely saw them again; Colin had a huge row with them after a performance and walked away: he didn’t contact them, they didn’t contact him, it was over.c Three boys were left, all guitarists—a nucleus.

  After all the upset of the previous year, Jim McCartney did what he could to make Paul keep to his revision timetable, his main tranche of GCE O-Level exams due in June. Paul was already looking beyond them. In the spring, he wrote an undated letter to Mike Robbins asking for summer jobs at a Butlin’s camp—not music but “any kind of work”—on behalf of himself, Len (Garry, presumably) and John (Lennon). Though he mentioned in passing that his group had a “smashing” new guitarist, George was simply too young for work. “Both of my friends look 17,” Paul blarneyed, cognizant of Butlin’s employment rules. In fact, while John was approaching 18, Len was 16 and Paul only closing in on that age; he was hoping Robbins could pull some strings for them. “We would do any kind of work,” Paul assured him, adding that they’d be free from the middle of July …

  * * *

  * Derek Taylor, a Merseysider in Los Angeles, said on his KRLA radio show in 1967: “Laff is a great Liverpool word. ‘Had a laff and over dinner …’ It’s a highly prized commodity, a laff, especially in Liverpool where there’s hardly anything to laff at unless you laff at all the sadness and poverty. On Saturday nights in the old days the best night out was what you called ‘a laff and a shout’—that meant sitting in the pub all laffing and shouting, then going to the dance, laffing some more, falling over, bruising your knee, and if you woke up the next morning and could only remember a fraction of what had happened, you knew it had been a good night out.”

  † Alan and Iris were born here. Like the general area of which it is part, Broadgreen can also be written like that, as one word.

  ‡ The house was named Balgownie, at 25 Oakhill Park, six doors along from where Johnny lived and just around the corner from Alan. The Morgue was the second such venue in Liverpool. Another, similar club—also in the cellar of a large Victorian house—opened a week earlier in Hayman’s Green, West Derby; it will appear shortly in this history (see Chapter 10).

  § Glossy black-and-white photographic postcards, literally called “throwaways” in the business. Every artist had them, often with the logo of their record company printed under the photo and sometimes with a biographical blurb on the reverse. Freely available to fans, they and autograph books were the main items signed by the stars.

  ‖ His birth certificate gives his name as Russell Geoffrey Mahomed but he used the middle name as his first and always spelled it Jeffrey, being known to everyone as Jeff.

  a Jeff Mahomed died in 1974, aged 40. He was never interviewed about his friendship with John and there’s no photograph of them together. In 1980 (when John himself was 40) he mentioned his old friend during a BBC interview and then cut across his anecdote to interject “rest his soul.”

  b An acetate, or lacquer, was an aluminum disc with a nitrocellulose lacquer coating; because the grooves were softer than a conventionally pressed record, the sound quality deteriorated by degrees each time it was played. Acetates were much used in the music business as the quickest and easiest means of distributing recorded sound.

  c As usual, where and when this was remains unknown, but other events in their lives suggest it could have been before the summer.

  NINE

  JUNE–DECEMBER 1958

  “THIS IS MY LIFE”

  As an alcoholic with a restaurant job in the city, Julia Lennon’s “husband” John Albert Dykins—aka Bobby and (to John Lennon) Twitchy—had been courting trouble for years, driving home to the southern suburbs in the early hours. Just after midnight on Friday, June 20, however, half an hour into Saturday morning, his luck ran out. He was driving drunk along Menlove Avenue, just beyond Mendips, when he was observed by a constable walking his beat. Though the car was going at normal speed, its engine was racing. Dykins should have turned right at the lights but, seeing the policeman, shot left, and the car mounted the reservation between Menlove Avenue and Vale Road. The constable got to the road and flashed a torch, signaling him to stop, but Dykins drove on and came to a halt farther along Vale Road. Noticing that the driver’s breath smelled strongly of drink, and that his speech was slurred, the policeman asked him to get out; Dykins opened the door and fell out, and had to be helped to his feet. Told he was being arrested, Dykins became aggressive and abusive, shouting, “You —— fool, you can’t do this to me, I’m the press!”1

  Dykins was taken to Woolton police station where a doctor certified him unfit to drive. Held overnight in a cell, he was charged in th
e morning and taken straight to the court, to be remanded on bail of £5. When he reappeared there on July 1, his solicitor entered a guilty plea and Dykins was fined £25 plus costs, had his license endorsed, and was disqualified from driving for a year. The incident was reported in both of the city evening papers and also twice in the local Liverpool Weekly News, which will have caused no little embarrassment in the family.2 The Stanley sisters did not think highly of Julia’s man-friend.

  He immediately left or lost his job: either he was dismissed or gave it up, incapable of getting home late from the city, taxis unaffordable. The drunk-driving incident had set in motion a sequence of events that reached a terrible calamity two weeks later.

  Julia was often at Mimi’s. Their original relationship had been rekindled since John began shuttling between them. Her visit on Tuesday, July 15, had a purpose, though. The summer term at Liverpool College of Art had ended on Friday the 4th, three days after Bobby Dykins lost his license and his job and had been fined the equivalent of about three weeks’ wages, cash they may not have had. Financially, things were suddenly tight at 1 Blomfield Road, and Dykins had told Julia a stark truth as he saw it: they could no longer afford to have John staying at the house. It was going to be hard enough to feed the two girls without a gluttonous young man eating them out of house and home. If Julia didn’t agree, then perhaps discussions became heated, because—heavy-hearted or otherwise—she ended up going to Mendips to convey this very message. John was at Blomfield Road when she left to pay the visit.3

  Having said what she’d gone there to say, Julia left for home at 9:45. She had three choices: to walk all the way, perhaps cutting across the golf course; to walk down to Woolton Road and catch the bus to Garston (and then walk); or to cross Menlove Avenue and catch the bus going north, toward Penny Lane, and then change for a bus cutting back south again, to Springwood. She chose the last. On another day, Bobby might have come to collect her … if right here on Menlove Avenue he hadn’t lost his license … but for which she mightn’t have been here at all.

  Mimi sometimes walked Julia to the bus stop, but this summer’s evening they parted at the gate. A number 4 was due within a couple of minutes. Just as Julia was about to head off, Nigel Walley came along, hoping to find John at home.

  Mimi said John was out, then Julia said, “Oh Nigel, you’ve just arrived in time to escort me to the bus stop.” Julia said her good-byes to Mimi and I started walking with her. When we got to Vale Road I turned up while she crossed Menlove Avenue, and at that moment I heard a car skidding and a thump and I turned to see her body flying through the air. I rushed over. It wasn’t a gory mess but she must have had severe internal injuries. To my mind, she’d been killed instantly. I can still see her gingery hair fluttering in the breeze, blowing across her face.4

  Walley ran to Mendips but the commotion had already brought Mimi back outside. By chance, long-term lodger Michael Fishwick was there too. “Mimi and I heard the screech of brakes. We looked at each other and took off in full-flight out of the house. We ran up the road and across and there was Julia, looking quite peaceful, bloodied only at the back of her head. A crowd gathered. Someone ran off to ring for an ambulance. She gave one final breath and died.”5

  Mimi, still in her carpet slippers, went in the back of the ambulance that sped Julia’s body to Sefton General Hospital. What hell that must have been. Fishwick followed with her shoes and handbag, and then the police took them to Blomfield Road where no one yet had any idea of the terrible events.

  Mimi would recall John being out at the time, but when he came in and was told the news he broke down, saying, “Oh God, oh God.” John’s own recollection, when talking about it nine years later, was different. He remembered a policeman coming to the door and, as if in a film scene, asking for confirmation he was Julia Dykins’ son. When John mumbled a yes, the constable replied, “I’m sorry to tell you your mother’s dead.”6

  Bobby phoned for a taxi to get him and John to the hospital. As John would recall, “He [Twitchy] said, ‘Who’s going to look after the kids?’ and I hated him. Bloody selfishness.”7 John gabbled hysterically all the way, but when they got to the hospital, unlike Bobby, he couldn’t bring himself to see the body. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. We’d caught up so much, me and Julia, in just a few years. We could communicate. We got on. She was great. I thought, ‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. That’s really fucked everything. I’ve no responsibilities to anyone now.’ ”8

  The funeral was the following Monday, July 21, at Allerton Cemetery. John never spoke of it publicly and there’s only one reliable witness to confirm he was in some way part of it. His cousin Liela (while not saying explicitly that John was or wasn’t at the cemetery) would relate how she and John were at The Cottage, 120a Allerton Road, afterward, for post-funeral sandwiches. “John and I just sat there on the couch, him with his head on my lap. I never said a word. I can’t even recall telling him I was sorry. There was nothing you could say. We were both numb with anguish.”9

  The grief was not John’s alone. In one instant, four children had lost a mother, an estranged husband lost a wife, a man lost his partner, four women lost a loved sister, three nephews and a niece lost an aunt, and Liverpool lost one of its colorful characters. The fallout was widespread.

  Julia’s two youngest daughters, Julia and Jacqui, weren’t at the funeral and for many months weren’t told their mum was dead or why they weren’t seeing her, nor did they carry on living with their father. For reasons that aren’t clear (but may be related to Bobby’s comment in the taxi, or the family’s knowledge of the accident’s wider cause), they were allowed to be made “wards of court” and raised by their Aunt Harrie and Uncle Norman at The Cottage. As a consequence of losing a mother they lost their father too, and were never really told why.

  Because the law ruled there had to be an inquest, newspaper reports were inevitable, and in these the secret of Julia’s surname spilled out. The first mention in the Liverpool Weekly News called her Mrs. Juliette Dykins, aged 40, the second—correctly—Mrs. Julia Lennon, 44.10 The authorities finally realized that the longtime occupants of the council house at 1 Blomfield Road weren’t who they’d said they were, that the property had been obtained on the lie of a pretense marriage. Julia and Bobby Dykins were instantly exposed to one and all as having “lived in sin,” their two girls illegitimate in the eyes of the law and the morals of the day. This could explain why Bobby was so quickly gone from the house. In the space of weeks, perhaps even days, he lost his car, his job, his wife, his children and his home. Strangely, though, his new home was better situated than Blomfield Road: 97 School Lane wasn’t on an estate but among trees, backing onto Woolton Golf Course and facing Woolton Woods, an ordinary council house but on a quiet and pleasant rural lane.

  The fatal accident hardened, irrevocably, John Lennon’s view of the Establishment, and especially the police. Coming to believe the driver who killed his mother was “a drunk off-duty cop,” his respect for authority, and especially the law, crumbled and would only ever worsen. Where most people saw law and order, John would only see rank hypocrisy. The driver, Eric Clague, was an off-duty cop; he was also a learner-driver and shouldn’t have been on the road unaccompanied, and was suspended from the force because of it; but he was never charged with being drunk, and alcohol wasn’t mentioned at the inquest. Though it’s possible it was suppressed, it’s also possible this cornerstone of John’s lasting grudge against the police was set in misinformation.

  Julia’s husband took the news badly. Alf Lennon probably hadn’t seen his wife in twelve years, not since the eventful Blackpool episode of 1946, when John was five. They’d never divorced, and this meant he was entitled to her estate. When Julia’s sisters tried to claim on her life insurance it was made clear that the man they still thought of as “that Alf Lennon”—another of Julia’s winners; where was he? in prison? drunk somewhere no doubt—would have to be found and persuaded to let them keep the money.<
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  Alf later said he learned of Julia’s death two months after the fact—“I was out of work in London at the time, living in a doss house in King’s Cross.”11 He received word after getting in touch with his youngest brother Charles, who then sent him a cutting from the Liverpool Echo. Alf took it badly. He wasn’t one for bitterness or grudges—he lived for the present, each day a fresh start—but this was painful news. He hit the road again and somehow managed to break a leg … and it was while in this condition, resting in a Salvation Army hostel in London, that another letter from Charles reached him, explaining his entitlement to Julia’s legacy.

  Little in Alf’s life was clear-cut. What happened next depends on which of two conflicting accounts is correct, assuming either is. Both are his own. In one, he dragged his broken leg to Liverpool only to be told by the Dale Street solicitor that Julia’s sisters had somehow swindled him out of the money. In the other, the solicitor told him £530 (a fortune) was his for the taking … and he, a gambler and down-and-out, heroically refused it, all of it, and said it should be held in trust for John at 21.12 Whatever happened, Julia’s death was another bitter blow. Alf had spent seven summers washing dishes at Middleton Tower holiday camp in Morecambe, but even this had come to an end; instead, he continued a well-established pattern: menial jobs in hotels (usually washing up) and vagrancy, the down-at-heel but never down-at-heart Alf, the happy drinker falling in the muck but coming up with a smile and a song.