Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  The peril of appearing second house and having to wait for the end of the show was the possibility of missing the last train home to Liverpool. The local station, Ardwick, closed after the rush hour, so Johnny and the Moondogs had to get back to Manchester Central by walking, running or hoping for a bus. They had no real idea where they were and no money to stay overnight; they were also expected home at a certain time and due in school the next morning. The last Liverpool train from Manchester Central left at 10:35 and even this would only deposit them back in south Liverpool close to midnight, so there came a point in the evening when they knew they had to “leg it.” It might have been only minutes before Jackie Collins was announcing, “And let’s welcome back again Johnny and the Moondogs!,” but when she did, there none came. Would they have won? Had they missed out again on the chance (of a chance) of Levis’ weekly ATV show, or his BBC radio series? Quite possibly, because George remembers, “We thought we were really good.”44 Arthur Kelly confirms the three were far from pleased with the way it had all worked out: “They were cross about it. We didn’t actually wreck the train carriage on the way back but we jumped about and spat on the mirror—1950s petty vandalism. It wasn’t quite ‘tearing up the seats’ but someone would have had to go in and clean up after us.”

  John, Paul and George’s belief that stars were made like this, “discovered overnight,” was more than mere cliché—it seemed to be all around them, especially when Britain’s best-known rock and roll manager Larry Parnes came to Merseyside and signed up Arthur Kelly’s cousin. Young Ronnie Wycherley was a boy who, like the Quarry Men, had paid to have a record made by Percy Phillips; a boy who, like Johnny and the Moondogs, had just been to Manchester to impress Carroll Levis; a boy from rough tough Dingle who’d been in the same form at St. Silas primary school as Richy Starkey, and who, just like Richy, had been in and out of children’s hospitals and missed much of his education. Now, suddenly, with one wave of Parnes’ wand, Ronnie Wycherley was gone in a puff of Woodbines and it was long live Billy Fury, kitted out in sleek suits, signed to Decca, appearing on TV, every inch “a star” (though he hadn’t yet sold a record). Ronnie had talent, certainly, but if it could happen to him then it could happen to anyone.

  Something similar was occurring with another habitué of the Soho coffee bars, 17-year-old Harry Webb, a Ricky Nelson and Elvis fan from just north of London. Webb was signed by Norrie Paramor to the Columbia label on EMI’s usual penny-per-record contract, but only after Decca turned him down.‖ His next few months were a blur, embodying every good, bad and ugly side of the British music business. First he was given a change of name, to Cliff Richard; then Franklyn Boyd, a music publisher, forced him to record as his debut disc “Schoolboy Crush,” an American cover version he was pushing, which Webb wouldn’t have chosen; and then Paramor imposed session musicians on his backing group the Drifters.

  Cliff Richard’s breakthrough happened only because Jack Good, a music man, flipped the record, heard “Move It!,” and flipped out. It was a terrific track; and when Good saw the boy’s photo he knew he’d look great on camera. This was just what Good needed for his first ITV rock show—Oh Boy!—to be launched on September 13 in direct opposition to his tired old Six-Five Special on the BBC. Under Good’s characteristic instruction, Cliff went for maximum excitement, ramping up the pouting and writhing like a pre-army Elvis. “I got him to be mean, moody and magnificent,” Good says.45 Cliff Richard exploded into stardom inside two and a half minutes that Saturday evening. EMI made “Move It!” the A-side and it almost cracked the top of the charts, and deservedly so. Up in Liverpool it was immediately noted by John Lennon and Tony Carricker. “We thought ‘Move It!’ was absolutely fucking brilliant,” says Tony. “It was British but head and shoulders above anything else.” John confirmed it was a good record—at long last, something made in Britain that sounded American: “ ‘Move It!’ by Cliff Richard was the first one that had anything like the right echo on it. Before that there had been nothing, just nothing at all. Nothing had ever got anywhere near [the American sound].”46

  The American sound itself remained the real deal, of course. Paul splashed some pocket money on Elvis’s Golden Records, the first compilation of Presley’s greatest hits—fourteen tracks, ten of them million-sellers in America. It set him back just a halfpenny under £2—the most expensive LP he’d bought—but it served up endless joy and introduced him, John and George to songs they’d not heard before, old tracks but new to them, which they soon added to their guitar sessions, such as the Sun-recorded country songs “I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.” Paul liked to sing the first of these, while the second became one of the very few numbers they let George sing, and he also reveled in the Scotty Moore guitar solo; at the same time, there was a new Chuck Berry single, “Carol,” on which John not only sang but insisted he played lead (provided he had use of a guitar).

  Other new records in the last months of 1958 that appealed strongly to them and which they either bought, stole from shops or pocketed at parties were “Whole Lotta Loving” c/w “Coquette” by Fats Domino, Eddie Fontaine’s “Nothin’ Shakin’ (But the Leaves on the Trees)”—George bought this—the Coasters’ ”Yakety Yak” c/w “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart”—Paul bought this—and one they all loved, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” by the Teddy Bears, a quirkily original harmony ballad in 6/8 time, the label of which showed just a single surname for the composer: Spector. The development of John, Paul and George’s harmony singing took shape with this arresting song; they switched the “him” to “her” and set about correctly pitching their voices. As Paul would recall, “ ‘To know-know-know is to love-love-love’ was the first three-part we ever did. We learned that in my house in Liverpool. We just loved singing three-part.” Paul also says his dad helped them with the technique.47

  The last day of term for John, Paul and George was Friday December 19, and the next day they had a booking, a family do, invited to play at the wedding reception for George’s big brother Harry and his bride Irene. Here it was, in the front bar of the Childwall Abbey Hotel—a historic pub on Childwall Abbey Road—that Japage 3 made their public debut.a

  It had all started one day when John was in town with art school friend Derek Hodkin:

  We were in Lewis’s having a cup of tea when John said, “Somebody said you’ve got a tape recorder, Derek.” I’d done my National Service with the RAF and been given £200 in compensation after a motorcycle accident. I bought a Magnafon FRS tape recorder from Beaver Radio, suitcase-size but portable, with a carrying handle, so I had something John wanted. He was only my friend because I had a tape recorder, but I was quite happy about that: I was pleased to show off.48

  The consequence of this conversation came one foggy night, probably at the end of November 1958, when Hodkin lugged the machine from his home in Widnes up to Allerton, to tape a musical get-together at 20 Forthlin Road. “I was almost 22 and smoking a pipe, a serious young man in a duffel-coat. The first thing Paul’s dad said to me was ‘Good to meet you, Derek—I’m glad they’ve got someone sensible with them.’ ”

  John, Paul and George were joined on this occasion by a drummer—Paul’s brother Mike. The four of them and their instruments plus Derek and his recorder all squeezed into the front parlor. The precise origin of Mike’s drum kit remains unclear. The way he puts it, Paul cobbled it together while its true owners were looking the other way, adding, “We didn’t ask any questions about how he got it [but] I think he acquired it for me so that I could be the drummer in the group.”49 Regrettably, Mike’s technique was hampered by a bad arm. Despite intensive physiotherapy, including electric shock treatment, it hadn’t properly recovered from being fractured at the 1957 scout camp. Paul also practiced with the drums and, inevitably, was a much better player, working out how to sweep around the kit like the drummer in Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” However, Paul emphatically ruled out any prospect of being the d
rummer that he, John and George so sorely needed. Why would he want to play drums when he could be out front, playing guitar and singing?

  As Derek Hodkin remembers it, the recording session was “an hour of repartee, jokes, laughs, practice, songs, and quite a few ribald remarks about my girlfriend.”

  I liked classical music and didn’t really know rock and roll. I’d only heard of Elvis Presley. So when John said to Paul, “Do your Little Richard,” and he sang “Long Tall Sally,” it sounded incredible there in the front room, a terrific sound, so loud and exciting. It was like they all had party pieces. John said, “George, play that bit for Derek …” I thought George was a bit of a show-off—he played guitar the best and let us know it, but everyone liked it. Then John and Paul started singing a little ditty that went “I fancy me chances with you, I fancy me chances with you …”50

  Hodkin filled a seven-inch spool of Emitape, then played it back for them—an experience he says they all enjoyed immensely. It was exciting, and ideas formed in the bubble. Derek remembers, “They said to me, ‘You can be our manager!’ ” He didn’t mind the suggestion at all.

  Along with his recording gear Derek carried an RAF notebook, and when John, Paul and George started to pitch and toss ideas for a new group name he wrote them down in pencil. He still has the book, where the ideas remain, a moment frozen in time:

  THE POLECATS

  THE RAVENS

  THE BLACKBIRDS

  THE JACKDAWS

  THE JAYBIRDS

  The Ravens is the only name underlined, so it was probably a favorite for a while, but the last of the five evidently sparked a new mode of thinking because, above all of them—in larger letters, dominant—Hodkin wrote JAPAGE 3.

  As Hodkin explains it, Japage—pronounced as “Jaypage”—came from the “J” for John, “pa” for Paul and “ge” for George, and it was “3” because they were staying a trio, having no intention of keeping Mike as drummer. Playing for a recorded rehearsal was one thing, going on stage another. He wasn’t even 15 and was like a one-armed bandit.

  Before leaving Forthlin Road that evening Hodkin offered John, Paul and George the tape, but they couldn’t afford to repay him its cost (about thirty shillings), besides which they had no means of playing it, so he took it home. He set to work right away: “When I got home to Widnes I insisted on my parents listening to this tape. They both pronounced it ‘noisy rubbish’ but I said I was going to manage them.” He then took a tabbed A–Z phone directory and wrote across the front “ ‘The Japage 3’ Engagements Book.” This records that on December 2, 1958, he carried out his first duties, contacting (probably by letter) the Territorial Army’s Entertainments Officer at the Drill Hall in Widnes; he also contacted the man who handled bookings at La Scala Ballroom, Runcorn. Underneath each entry Hodkin wrote “£4,” indicating the fee he was seeking—perhaps a pound for each of them.

  But Japage 3’s first booking wasn’t arranged by their manager and he knew nothing of it: it was at George’s brother’s wedding party. There’s a fine photo of the trio playing here, framed in the window of Childwall Abbey Hotel: John is again without a guitar (not even bothering with the rubbish one he’d swiped in Manchester), they’re dressed in neat uniform dark suits and ties, and they all have quiffs. History doesn’t record what they sang, but George would recall them being drunk, and the groom remembers John’s most singular contribution to the event: pouring his pint of ale over the head of an elderly lady pianist and wedding guest and announcing, “I anoint thee David.” Outlandish behavior was so typical at Liverpool parties, no one took against John for his action, not even the beer-soaked woman; she just walked off, silently but stickily, to try to dry herself.51

  Two-thirds of Japage 3 saw their manager again a couple of days later, at his house, as Derek Hodkin recalls:

  I threw a party for Monique, my “French girlfriend,” who was visiting me. For Englishmen at that time, the very thought of a French girl was erotic. I chose not to invite George but this didn’t stop John and Paul coming—they knew I’d have some pretty girls there. Though I didn’t ask them to bring guitars, Paul did and he was busy playing and chatting up all the girls; John was in his usual tight trousers, black T-shirt and jacket, very beatnikish. Neither of them got off with anyone. My eighty-something grandfather said they were “ne’er-do-wells.”

  John and Paul were closer than ever at the end of 1958, a double-act forged through so many dimensions. No one ever made Paul laugh more than John, and right here at Christmastime came an incident he would always tell with great fondness. After leaving Forthlin Road late one night without his glasses, John told Paul he saw on Mather Avenue “some mad people sitting in their front porch playing cards at one o’clock in the bloody morning.” What?! The next time Paul went past he looked for himself, and it was an illuminated nativity scene. Cue hysterics.

  Reflecting on this period less than a decade later, Paul remarked how “Each year seemed five years”52—but they were growing up fast. At the McCartney clan’s annual New Year’s Eve knees-up in Aintree, Paul was now deemed old enough to work behind the bar (a plank of wood on a few crates), pouring ale from the barrel, learning about “gin and it” and “rum and black.” There was his dad leading the singing from the piano, playing all the wonderful tunes of the 1920s and ’30s; there was his dear Uncle Jack cracking great jokes to all the kids; there was the entire bevvied Liverpool lot of them swaying to Carolina Moon; there was the lone piper entering the house at midnight; and there was Paul, filled to the gills with black velvet, seeing in 1959 in the time-honored fashion … by throwing up.53

  * * *

  * Oblivious to this past association, the airport was renamed Liverpool John Lennon Airport in 2002, and the art deco terminal building where he worked, and spat in the sandwiches, is now Crowne Plaza Liverpool John Lennon Airport Hotel. (He’s sure to have come up with a pithier name.)

  † One of the sketchy details is how they got here from Liverpool and back again. Paul says they hitchhiked—quite a risk considering their youth. They certainly hitchhiked on a second such holiday in 1959.

  ‡ Liverpool Echo’s weekly Mersey Beat music column on November 15, 1958, called skiffle “as much out of fashion as a five-year-old Paris design.”

  § Or as John put it, when it was part of a best-selling book six years later, “Written in conjugal with Paul.”

  ‖ Decca didn’t meet Webb but heard a demo disc, recorded in the tiny studio within the HMV record shop on Oxford Street. Decca’s Dick Rowe also turned down another Parnes signing, Reg Smith, renamed Marty Wilde.

  a Childwall is pronounced “Chilled-wall.”

  YEAR 2, 1959

  THREE COOL CATS

  TEN

  JANUARY–JULY 1959

  “A SORT OF VIOLENT TEDDY BOY”

  The mainspring of so much joy and inspiration was cruelly shut off on Tuesday, February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash at the age of 22. News reached his Liverpool disciples the following morning. Thelma Pickles remembers John discussing it in the art school canteen at lunchtime, though not seeming particularly affected. Another death of someone special to him. He had barriers for such upset. Paul McCartney would recall how word went around Liverpool Institute: “I remember being in my old school playground. We used to get there in the morning and go to what we called smokers’ corner, where we’d smoke a quick Woodbine before we went into classes. Someone had a Daily Mirror and there was the headline that Buddy Holly had died. The rug was pulled from underneath us. It was quite shocking.”1

  At the same time, Derek Hodkin’s management of Japage 3 was petering out, the first flush of interest having dissipated. Only four pages in “ ‘The Japage 3’ Engagements Book” have handwriting. Most intriguingly, he made contact with a Sergeant Head, who ran the NCO club on the United States Air Force base at Burtonwood, sixteen miles from Liverpool. Had Japage 3 played here they would have been seen by an American audience for the first time; but despit
e several discussions between Hodkin and Head over a £5 Sunday booking, it never materialized.

  The only date Japage 3’s manager successfully fixed was at La Scala Ballroom, Runcorn, where they had an on-stage audition during the Teenage Night on March 2, while the resident Stan Clarke Orchestra took an interval break. The fee was a refund of their return train fares from Liverpool. Hodkin couldn’t be present, so Tony Carricker—who lived in Widnes, just across the river from Runcorn—took it upon himself to be their guide, which included leading them on the half-mile walk from station to ballroom.

  It was just John and his mates Paul and George, and they only had acoustic guitars. There might have been another guy, a piano player, because in my mind they were the Japage 4, but I could be wrong. I do remember a group of girls bursting into our train carriage, girls I saw on my daily journey, so my stock with the guys went up considerably. The only other thing I remember is sitting on the edge of the stage with John when two local girls came up and asked us if we wanted to dance. We both looked at each other and said no. We didn’t fancy the idea of dancing with strangers.2

  Soon afterward, Hodkin was able to tell John that La Scala liked Japage 3 and was offering a £4 booking on May 8. Accepted. But one date is all it was going to be—Hodkin was finding rock management a complete bore. He cheerfully admits the group were never his priority: “I was going out with a different girl every night of the week and that was so much more interesting than Japage 3.” Also, he found the lads demanding. “George would say to me, ‘Have you got us any more dates, Derek?’ and I thought he was cocky and aggressive, rather too full of himself for a 15-year-old. I was 22 and he treated me as though I should be doing things for him.”3