Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  The writers of “Kansas City” were Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the brilliantly inventive composers and producers who also continued to come up with records for the Coasters. “Searchin’ ” was the first to make a splash in Liverpool and there’d been several others; then, in March 1959, they cooked up another fine pairing: “Charlie Brown” c/w “Three Cool Cats,” again blending stagey satire with memorable vocal harmonies and sax breaks. These weren’t just songs, they were playlets, rhythm and blues with plotlines, wit, atmosphere, incidents and accidents. John, Paul and George liked “Charlie Brown” and they consumed “Three Cool Cats”: they learned it with joyful care and sang it standing close together, taking all the different parts, perfecting the intricate timing essential to a successful performance. Once “Three Cool Cats” went into their stage set it remained a favorite for years.‡

  History doesn’t tell if Japage 3 sang “Three Cool Cats” when they performed at La Scala Ballroom in Runcorn on Friday May 8. This was the £4 date earned from their March audition but they weren’t named in the local newspaper ad, which merely stated it was the Old Quay Workshops Social Club Dance, 8PM to 1AM, licensed bar, admission five shillings. It was the end of the line for the Japage boys and their manager. Derek Hodkin had fixed the booking but didn’t turn up to see how it went. “I had the flu,” he says. “A couple of days later, at college, John said, ‘Where were you then?’ That was the end of it, really—they didn’t want to know any more, and nor did I. That was the end of my participation.”

  Hodkin’s disaffection with “management,” the expiry of what had only ever been a whim, was confirmed over the following five weeks, to his lasting regret. The appeal of magnetic recording tape was that, while expensive to buy, it was reusable. Though Hodkin had briefly managed a rock and roll trio, the classics remained his favorite music, and during the course of two mornings, May 31 and June 14, 1959, he recorded extracts from the BBC Home Service program Your Concert Choice over the one and only Japage 3 session that Forthlin Road evening the previous November. Hodkin retains the spool of tape to this day, but where the larks, laffs and songs of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were is Elgar’s The Wand of Youth and Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants.

  The end of Japage 3 mattered least to George. He was playing every Sunday at Lowlands with the Les Stewart Quartet, and it was at this time that he moved even further beyond John and Paul in terms of guitars, buying a secondhand Hofner Club 40 from Ray Ennis of the Swinging Bluegenes. It was George’s first fully electric guitar and he was thrilled: “I thought it was the most fantastic guitar ever.”25 The name provided value too—John called it a “Club Footy” and they all did the same. This was now very much their shared humor, and where George led, John wasn’t far behind: every time he played the Club Footy he liked it, so now he wanted to go electric too. For much of 1959 he badgered Mimi into putting down the deposit and signing as guarantor on a new guitar to be bought on the drip from Frank Hessy’s. It was something Julia probably would have done for him without much hesitation, but Mimi was always reluctant to support something she knew would distract John from study. “His training would last, but these things come and go. One week everybody’s clamoring for a guitar, then they disappear and nobody ever hears of them again. And what was I going to do if I had a boy of 21 thrown back on me hands qualified for nothing?”26 Beyond this, how anyway would John be able to repay her and meet Hessy’s weekly terms? He was useless with money; he spent it—drank it—like water and was always flat broke and on the scrounge. Mimi’s final word on the matter—and she probably made quite certain John heard it—was that he would have to show willing, to prove he could fund a good chunk of the cost himself, before she’d even consider getting involved in buying a guitar. This, she surely imagined, would put paid to the matter once and for all.§

  Although John and Paul weren’t playing in a group for much of this period, they were far from inactive. It will always be impossible to attach precise dates of creation to the early Lennon-McCartney Originals but quite a number can be ascribed with some certainty to 1959. At the same time, while they were still sagging off for fun afternoons in the front parlor at 20 Forthlin Road, and pressing close together in the echoey porch of Mendips, Tennessee, neither happened as frequently as before, and they were mostly creating alone. Most (possibly all) of the new songs from this time frame were written by one and then appraised and perhaps improved by the other, and Paul was by far the more prolific. This was partly because much of the time John either didn’t have a guitar or didn’t have one he wanted to play, and also because most of his creativity was going into the written word, his funny poetry and prose. He himself would reflect, “We used to write things separately because Paul was always more advanced than I was. He was always a couple of chords ahead and his songs usually had more chords in them. His dad played the piano—he was always playing pop and jazz standards and Paul picked things up from him.”27

  In no particular order, the Lennon-McCartney Originals from this period include:

  • “Love of the Loved.” Paul remembers coming up with this on the Zenith and also late one night as he walked home to Allerton: either he’d taken a girl out or been at John’s and was braving the dark shortcut home over the golf course, in which case it may be from one of those times he played guitar and sang at the top of his voice into the scary pitch blackness. Structurally and harmonically, the middle-eight leaned on the same section of the Teddy Bears’ (Phil Spector’s) “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” but the song smartly transcended its influences.‖ The title might have been a phrase Paul heard and seized on—a technique he’d already used with “Thinking of Linking.”

  • “I’ll Follow the Sun.” Paul came up with this rhythmic ballad alone, words and music, on his Zenith guitar.

  • “What Goes On.” Written by John, probably at Mendips. Strong Buddy Holly influence.a• “A World Without Love.” A song fragment conceived by Paul during a dark, late-night walk home. He rarely made any bold claims for this one because of John and George’s reaction to the opening line when he first demonstrated it. As Paul remembers, “I came in and said, ‘Listen to this song, fellers. “Please lock me away …” ’ and everyone laughed. And that was it.” Paul never did change the opening line, and on the occasions he played it, when he sang “Please lock me away” John would interject “Yes, OK,” and end it there.28

  • “I’ll Be On My Way.” A Paul song with which John always happily declared no association. Written on the Zenith, with an attractively simple melody but the kind of lyric these writers usually spurned (“When the June light turns to moonlight”).

  • “Like Dreamers Do.” Another interesting McCartney song. George felt it exuded the influence of Jim McCartney, in the vein of his Gershwin favorite “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.”29

  • “You’ll Be Mine.” A 1960 recording of this Paul song was performed with overblown drama, but it’s not clear if it was intended that way.

  • Several guitar instrumentals, mostly and perhaps entirely composed by Paul. It seems they were created this way, that they weren’t merely songs lacking a lyric: “Hot As Sun,” “Cayenne,” “Catswalk,” “Looking Glass,” “Winston’s Walk.” (Though Winston was John’s middle name it isn’t known for certain if this was his tune.)

  Some of these would remain unheard but—along with the already written “Love Me Do,” “I Call Your Name” and the tune of what would become “When I’m Sixty-Four”—several went on to become very well known, and one an American number 1. This is extraordinary, considering that most people’s early attempts at songwriting are stuck crudely and often laughably at first base. A few early Lennon-McCartney Originals were undoubtedly unsophisticated and unpolished—as the work of beginners, aged 16 to 18, they were bound to be—but quite patently there was also something very special happening here.

  In terms of group activity, the spring and summer of 1959 represents the quietest period for John, Paul and George. The answer
to “Where we going, Johnny?” appeared to be “nowhere,” yet these months strengthened the partnership; it was a time when the friendships grew ever tighter, when they enjoyed one another’s company not by performing but simply by going around to each other’s houses, larking and smoking and drinking and burping and farting, playing guitars and records, hanging out. It’s a period about which relatively little is known, but it was fundamental to the future. It’s interesting that though George enjoyed playing with the Les Stewart Quartet, and though the other members liked him, he never made the connection with them that he had with John and Paul; he stayed closer to the group that wasn’t playing than the one that was. As he would put it, “I loved my association with John and Paul because I had something in me which I recognized in them—which they must have or could have recognized in me, which is why we ended up together. And it was just great knowing there’s somebody else in life who feels similar to yourself.”30

  At the end of his second year in art school, John took the Intermediate Examination (tested in Life Drawing and Lettering) and failed. It isn’t known if he broke the news to Mimi. A resit was possible, but his prospects were beginning to look bleak. If he cared, it didn’t stop him from pursuing his usual good time at an end-of-term party, held in tutor Arthur Ballard’s room on Friday, July 3. Someone carted in a record player, a few people brought in 45s, and there was booze.

  John had been secretly admired for much of the term by one of the quietest girls on the course, Cynthia Powell, who came to college every day by train from Hoylake, on the northwest Wirral coast. Liverpudlians regard Hoylake as posh, and John certainly thought Cynthia was. “She was a right Hoylake runt, dead snobby,” he would remember. “We used to poke fun at her and mock her, me and my mate Jeff Mahomed. ‘Quiet please,’ we’d shout, ‘no dirty jokes. It’s Cynthia.’ ”31 The only class they took together was Lettering, all day Thursday in the Lecture Theatre, when John usually arrived late, sat behind Cynthia and constantly asked to borrow her equipment. He had nothing and she had everything, all neatly laid out; then she’d arrive home and find she was missing a ruler or a brush, whatever John had borrowed. John hated these classes: “They were all neat fuckers in Lettering—they might as well have put me in skydiving for all the use I was.”32

  One day, though, during a lecture by Dr. Warburg, Cynthia saw Helen Anderson casually stroke John’s hair and she was flushed with jealousy. It brought her up with a start, to realize she had feelings for such a brutish, intimidating young man; yet as the weeks passed she could think of nothing and no one else. It was infatuation—“He was the most outrageous character I’d ever met and I loved him for it.”33

  Jeff Mahomed kept telling John that Cynthia secretly fancied him, and at this July party—where John rapidly became drunk—Jeff was egging him on: “Ask her to dance.” So he did. John and Cynthia had a slow, smoochy shuffle around the classroom; she was in silent bliss and something clicked for him too. John asked if she’d like to go out with him sometime and Cynthia replied, “I’m awfully sorry, I’m engaged to this fellow in Hoylake.” John shot back, “I didn’t ask you to marry me, did I?”34

  Before long, everyone piled into the Cracke for a good drinking session, the young men downing pints of black velvet. John appeared to be ignoring Cynthia, and she and her close friend Phyllis McKenzie—they went everywhere together—were about to leave when the Lennon voice rose above the hubbub. “Didn’t you know Miss Powell was a nun, then?” That did it: she stayed, then the two of them left the pub, bought fish and chips at Vaughan’s and snuck up to Stuart’s room at 9 Percy Street where Cynthia proved she wasn’t a nun. They risked pregnancy right from the start. Cynthia next had a couple of weeks with her mother and family in Buckinghamshire, but they agreed to meet as soon as she returned.b

  The year at Liverpool Institute ended on July 23—guitars in the classrooms again—and it was the end of an era for many. Paul’s friend Ian James left, awaiting successful A-Level results that would arrive during August. Paul himself was one year behind, at the halfway point in his two-year A-Level courses. Neil Aspinall had taken his O-Levels and was quitting come what may; in August, he found he’d passed in eight subjects. And George Harrison left. He went back to leave, not having shown his face in the place since April. The three-month period of sagging off finally over, he turned up to collect his final report and also his testimonial—the piece of paper he could produce for prospective employers. It was written by The Baz, who wasn’t a man much given to sentimentality: “I can’t tell you what his work has been like because he hasn’t done any. [He] has taken part in no school activity whatsoever.”35 With this document George was meant to make his way in the world. As it was of no use to him at all, and given that his report betrayed in black and white the post-Easter absences he’d successfully obscured from his parents, George felt his only course of action was to burn both before he got home to Speke. He walked in through the door of 25 Upton Green a free boy, no longer in education … and not fit for any particular employment.

  He and Paul planned to take another holiday together toward the end of August, this time hitchhiking around the West Country. In the meantime, Paul got himself a summer job, working for a few weeks as second man on a delivery van at Lewis’s department store.36

  John was unable to go with Paul and George because he too had a job. Tony Carricker’s dad was general foreman on a building site in Scarisbrick, the Lancashire town just inland from Southport, twenty miles from home. A new waterworks was being constructed and Tony had fixed it for himself and John to be general laborers for the summer, on good money—about £5 a week. It was going to be tough work, the first physical labor John had ever attempted, but he had the purest of motives: that new electric guitar. Mimi had thrown down the gauntlet—if you want it, prove it—and John was fixed on doing just that.

  * * *

  * Charles Leslie Stewart (b.1941); he played banjo, mandolin and piano in addition to the guitar.

  † The Remo Quartet, technically gifted guitar players, included Colin Manley and Don Andrew, who were friendly with Paul and George at Liverpool Institute. The Swinging Bluegenes (sometimes just Bluegenes) weren’t rock but a hybrid of jazz, folk, pop and comedy. The Les Stewart Quartet were never in the newspaper because Lowlands didn’t advertise and their other bookings were parochial. Nor were Japage 3 ever listed.

  ‡ All the records mentioned were released in Britain by Decca’s London label except for Gene Vincent (on EMI’s Capitol).

  § There are no references to John playing his harmonica in these years. After finding the guitar in 1956 he seems to have left it alone for a long stretch of time.

  ‖ John, Paul and George always called the bridge section in the middle of a song “the middle-eight,” not realizing that, as a count of the bars, it could vary.

  a At this point substantially different from the version recorded for disc six years later; only the chorus was the same.

  b Cynthia Powell was born September 10, 1939, in a Blackpool boarding house (601 Promenade South) to which her mother had evacuated one week before, at the start of the Second World War. Her parents were Liverpudlians: Charles (born 1899, a traveling salesman of electrical goods for GEC; he smoked untipped cigarettes and died of lung cancer in 1956) and Lillian (née Roby, born 1900). They married in 1926 and settled in Hoylake during the war. Cynthia was an unplanned third child following brothers born in 1927 and 1931. Post-1956, with both sons gone from home, mother and daughter occupied 18 Trinity Road alone but for the occasional lodger brought in to pay the bills.

  ONE GENERATION BACK

  Jim Mac’s Band c.1920, working much the same halls Paul would play forty years later. It was a small dance band: most people here are revelers. Jim (third from right of bass drum, front row) played trumpet and piano.

  Speke in the late 1940s: a secure family life. Mary and Jim McCartney with Mike (left) and Paul (right).

  Richard Starkey, whose brief marriage to Elsie Gleave had
only one happy outcome: the younger Richard, known as Richy.

  Elsie married Londoner Harry Graves when Richy was 13—his genial nature helped sweeten Richy’s sickly childhood.

  There are no photos of John’s parents together. Here (front center) is Alf Lennon, the educated and eternally carefree “wacker,” on the Dominion Monarch. His best mate Billy Hall, who still remembers him well, is on the left.

  Harry and Louise Harrison—rock solid citizens of Wavertree and then Speke. George was the youngest of their four children.

  John’s surrogate parents—his fiercely independent Aunt Mimi and kindly impish Uncle George—in the back garden of the Woolton house where they raised him from the age of five.

  Still the only known picture of John and Julia, his extraordinary mother. It’s summer 1949—three years after he moved in with Mimi and George; he’s nearly nine, Julia is pregnant with her fourth child.