Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  The Casbah opened twenty-four hours later. It was a very pleasant summer’s evening, the cherry on a lovely day, and in tucked-away Hayman’s Green queues stretched along the Woolton-sandstone walls. Lowlands had competition. Kids paid a shilling admission and had to sign up as members at half a crown a year—blue membership cards for boys, pink for girls. The smell of fresh paint mingled attractively with cigarette smoke, hot dogs, espresso coffee, Brylcreem, hairspray and teenage perspiration. Records were played on a portable Dansette deck. Everyone admired the decor, especially a great white-and-red dragon painted the entire length of a black wall. And then there was the group: John, Paul, George and Ken … the group whose name was …

  Not much thought, or even less, had been given to this. The novelty of Japage had worn off and wasn’t relevant anyway unless they changed it to something like Japageken, which they definitely weren’t going to do. Johnny and the Moondogs? The Rainbows might have worked, given Paul’s painted ceiling just above their heads. None appealed, and it’s evident no new name came to mind, not even to that inspired wordsmith John Lennon, because they went back to the Quarrymen.‡ Given that John had hardly liked the name in the first place, and that any relevance to Quarry Bank High School was long past, why they went back to it is a conundrum, one that was never explained and never will be.

  Ken Brown became a group member for the time being, but never—in the eyes of John, Paul and George—one of them. They lived in the south of the city and he in the north, in Norris Green; they didn’t socialize with him and he wasn’t admitted into their tight circle; he was just a feller they saw when they played the Casbah, who had an amp and let them use it, and who took his fifteen shillings quarter-share of the £3 paid out in silver by Mrs. Best. Mostly he sat quietly at the back and strummed away; he sang one, perhaps two numbers, his main contribution being the light, sweetly-twee ballad “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.” Arthur Kelly, present at most Quarrymen sessions at the Casbah, remembers how John, Paul and George “slipped little guitar riffs behind Brown’s strict tempo to make it sound rockier.” As ever, Arthur’s duty was to report back about their sound and songs. “I’d sit and watch, and when they finished they’d be asking, ‘What was that song like? What did so-and-so sound like?’ I’d tell them where they were too loud or not loud enough, whatever adjustments were necessary.”

  Also up with the Quarrymen, witnessing their unexpected resuscitation, was Tony Carricker:

  Ken Brown didn’t fit in with anything—he wore suits with wide lapels, in pastel colors, didn’t have a very good haircut and wore glasses. The others turned down the volume on his guitar a bit, and turned George’s up. George took them all by surprise that first night because he did the “That’ll Be the Day” solo and hadn’t said anything about it. John was John, but for me the most impressive of the two of them was Paul, because he could sing like Little Richard and Sun-take Presley. He was the obvious vocalist. Paul could do early Presley better than anyone apart from Elvis himself.

  Just before the Casbah’s opening, Pete Best had been on holiday at an international students camp in Colomendy, North Wales, along with Collegiate friends Bill Barlow and Chas Newby. Both played in Lowlands group the Barmen and were among the many Pillar Club regulars who also went to the Casbah; Newby had seen George play with Les Stewart and now he was impressed by the Quarrymen. “They were good. When they sang ‘Three Cool Cats’ they harmonized on it, which was brilliant. Though they played the same stuff as everybody else—Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and all that—it was all guitars, no drums, and they could all sing.”15

  Members entered the Casbah through a door in the garden that led directly into the cellar. Up above was the extensive Best household, fifteen good-size rooms that, apart from a living room converted into a cloakroom for coats, were out of bounds to everyone but the inner circle. Through their weekly appearances here, John, Paul and George entered the Bests’ world, one quite unlike any they knew. The famous man of the house was scarcely seen. Johnny Best made it plain to Mona he wanted nothing to do with the Casbah and kept away; his disapproval was never going to stop her, of course—it was for the boys. Their marriage was in difficulties; some Casbah members swear Johnny had already moved out when the club opened, others say he was still there but only rarely. Soon he would be gone completely.

  Mona Best was 35, small and round, exuding a beauty that bewitched men of all ages. She was full of life and in love with fun, but didn’t suffer fools and stood no nonsense from anyone. She was amusing and generous, sharp and uncompromising, ever the boss. If you weren’t in, you were out. The Casbah began to open up on other nights, mostly as a venue for playing records and drinking Coke; and then in November 1959 a second group night was added, Sundays, in unbidden house-to-house combat with neighboring Lowlands. One club was an established youth community center not-for-profit, the other a private enterprise. Mona decreed that any Casbah group who then played Lowlands would not be booked again, and very few dared cross her.

  This was, too, a family with secrets. No one knew it, but Mona had had her two boys with different men. Johnny Best, doing war service in India as a physical training instructor, did not father her firstborn. The boy known as Pete Best was really Randolph Peter Scanland, born in the Egmore district of Madras on November 24, 1941, to 17-year-old Alice Mona Shaw and marine engineer Donald Peter Scanland. There is no record of their marriage. She married John Best at St. Thomas Cathedral, Bombay, when Randolph Peter was two years and three months, then John Rory Best was born in January 1945.16 It was as a foursome that they sailed into Liverpool at the end of that year. Johnny Best accepted Randolph Peter—known as Peter—as his son, and became the only real father the boy would know, but Peter had climbed far inside a shell, and until the end of her life it was Mona’s mission to entice him out of it. Peter and his mother—he called her “Mo”—had a relationship of quite extraordinary intensity. She was right behind him all the way, pushing, encouraging, dominating, cajoling, controlling, influencing, speaking for him, doing all she could—more than most mothers would ever consider—to bring a closed flower into bloom. Everyone who saw it talks about it: they simply idolized each other.

  Pete grew into a strong, muscly lad, exceptional at sports and carrying no excess weight, eminently capable of taking care of himself in a physical confrontation, which in Liverpool could always happen at any moment. He was also handsome, and knew it, trading on an introverted personality to project a studied bashfulness—the shyly sullen face, dark eyes looking up appealingly from bowed head, just a few words spoken in quiet monotone. Many girls flocked to him (and Pete showed them he wasn’t always shy). “Pete Best used to hover a lot at the Casbah,” Tony Carricker says. “He was definitely a presence—he was a very good-looking boy and had obviously decided to develop a moody pose at an early age.” Cyn remembers a private moment, also from the Casbah’s opening night: “I was upstairs in the house with John and Paul and then Pete came in and I thought how much he reminded me of the film star Jeff Chandler. What a handsome man … but so quiet, there with his mother.”17

  The 1959–60 academic year at Liverpool College of Art began on September 14, when a full-on relationship rocketed under the noses of John and Cyn’s amazed fellow students. With her in “the ladies,” Pat Jourdan witnessed Cynthia dressing-to-please. “She was putting on yet another layer of mascara, and she had on a black sweater and a very, very short tartan skirt with a fringe which she was moving upward. Then she said, ‘Pat, will you walk through the canteen with me? All the printing students are there and they’ll wolf-whistle.’ She wanted to be chaperoned past them just after she’d spent fifteen minutes titivating herself. What I didn’t know then was that it was all for John.”18

  It was lust-and-love and love-and-lust, and with John as the driver everything went at 200mph. No third party can ever know what binds a relationship, and though many joked that the only thing they had in common was nearsightedness—without glasses both we
re as blind as bats—difference was probably key to this attraction.

  For all her quiet personality and posh Hoylake credentials, Cyn met John’s needs. Her love for him was total and loyal, and yet she stood up to him; he was desperate for such assurance and stability, still only twelve months after the shattering ordeal of his mother’s death. Also, he’d been imagining himself falling for a beautiful artist and must have thought she was the one. Several years later he remarked, “I always had this dream of meeting an artist woman that I would fall in love with, even from art school.”19 He said this when speaking of another, but clearly he was thinking about it, looking for it, wishing it, now.

  As for Cyn herself, she was a quiet girl who’d never expressed herself with much boldness, so with John she was evidently rebelling in a huge way. She’d recently been engaged to a Hoylake window-cleaner and now found herself attached to a human whirlwind, hooked on his danger and outrageousness and believing her love could penetrate his extraordinary aggression. As she says, “His attitude was extremely ‘don’t look at me ’cause I’ll kill yer if you do’—but he wanted to be loved.”20 They also fancied each other like mad. Sex was big for them, grabbed where and when opportunities arose, though with both still living “at home” this wasn’t easy.

  Over time, as their relationship became “steady,” so their families entered the picture. Lillian Powell, for understandable reasons, formed the same instant opinion of John as almost every parent since his infancy: she didn’t like him at all. This made life tough for Cyn, who was close to her widowed mother and somewhat under the thumb of her dominating personality. John didn’t much care for Lillian either, so Cyn was left on the high-wire.

  John clearly sought the approval of his family. At some point, probably before the end of 1959, he took Cyn up to Edinburgh to meet his Aunt Elizabeth (Mater) and Uncle Bert, and cousin Stanley, hitchhiking there and back; and they also found favor in Woolton with John’s Aunt Harrie and Uncle Norman, in whose home John not only had a cousin but also his two young half sisters, Julia’s daughters. It’s said they all liked Cyn and she liked them. Mimi, of course, was adept at finding fault with everyone John brought home, even though Cyn was the model of good behavior and politeness.

  Then came the moment when Mimi and Lillian had to meet. John and Mimi took the train over to Hoylake for Sunday tea, to the tiny terraced house at 18 Trinity Road, leading down to the beach. The two indomitable and fiercely protective fifty-something widows maintained decorum for a while and then did away with pleasantries, each accusing the other’s child of distracting theirs from study. According to Cyn, it became so aerated that John ran out of the house in tears.21

  He was, she says, unable to stand the conflict. If so, it’s a sharp insight into the insecure and churned-up mind of John Lennon in 1959, because he was himself a constant source of conflict and turmoil to everyone around him. Cyn has spoken often of the “unreasonable rages” John inflicted on her, of his obsessive and addictive possessiveness and the loudly shouted unbridled jealousy he exhibited without any cause. Her dedication to the relationship was incredible—she knew he’d dismiss her in a second if she didn’t stand up to him, and he tested this endurance endlessly. “I was really quite terrified of him for 75 percent of the time,” she says.22 Being with John was a white-knuckle ride in a Force Ten storm and Cyn held on only in the hope of finding calmer waters ahead, believing she could be the one to steer him there. It was love.

  John’s third year at art school was in the lap of the gods and the hands of the principal, W. L. Stevenson, and the advice he took from some of his senior colleagues was that John should be allowed to stay on, despite having failed the Intermediate exam. He would have to resit it in May 1960, and if he failed that he’d be out; in the meantime, he began working toward the National Diploma in Design (NDD) qualification, beginning a second two-year course that would end in summer 1961.

  Encouraged and inspired by Stuart Sutcliffe, who was taking the same course but one year ahead, John pursued his NDD in the Department of Painting. As Cyn chose Illustration, their tutorials were separate, and with Stuart’s help—and freed from the intricate precision of Lettering—John suddenly threw himself into his work, using what Cyn would describe as “an orgy of oil paint, sand, sawdust, in fact anything he could lay his hands on to create paintings that were truly individual.”23 If John belonged anywhere at art school, it was here in the Department of Painting, but this doesn’t mean he agreed with his fellow students’ thinking—quite the reverse; he rebelled against them all, and it brought him to a crucial creative junction. “The thing to do then was to paint and destroy [the paintings] or just keep them in your own room. It’s hypocrisy. So I made the decision that what I did I wanted everybody to see, that I wasn’t going after the asceticism of the monastery or the lone artist who supposedly doesn’t care what people think about his work. I care a lot whether people hate it or love it because it’s part of me.”24

  Pat Jourdan, with John since they’d started at college two years previously, and ever a canny observer of his character, was awestruck not only by his creativity but also by the mind behind it.

  As an artist, John was quick, swift, dexterous, sharp. I don’t remember him being fired up by any particular artist—he was just John, sufficient being himself. He would see what somebody was doing, assimilate it, do it once and then drop it. We had a man called Tony Byrne come across from Birkenhead—he’d been to the American exhibition in London and started painting on the floor, on big pieces of hardboard. John walked in and said, “When are you going to add an egg?,” which was the advert at the time: “Add an egg.” Tony grumped. John then did a perfect painting on the floor, better than Tony’s, and never did another one again. That’s the sort of thing he’d do. He could look at people from the other end of a telescope, take in what they were about and move on. John lived a hundred lives while we had only one.25

  John’s friendship with Stuart was also growing stronger, and—mirroring his relationship with Cyn—few others could see the attraction, and in particular what it was about John that made Stuart want to be with him. Being John’s friend wasn’t easy, because he took the piss out of everyone, no exceptions, but they inspired each other, and they laughed, drank, painted and read together. Along with Rod Murray, they played snooker in the Philharmonic pub, and also in a hall near the Royal Court theater; Rod wasn’t very good, John was worse and Stuart completely hopeless—every time he went down on a shot they almost spilled their beer laughing, waiting for the baize to rip. But Stuart was recognized by almost everyone as the most talented artist in college, the star student, a sensitive and intuitive soul who saw that underneath his harsh exterior John Lennon had special qualities.

  With George no longer at school, Paul snuck alone into the college canteen to see John, but probably less frequently than before. Cyn observed how he “tried hard to impress John, posing and strutting with his hair slicked back to prove that he was cool, because John was very much the leader.”26 Paul was now in his final year at “the Inny,” class 6AM2, one of the oldest boys in the school. Apart from Ivan Vaughan, his main mates had left.§

  Paul was now deep into his Dusty Durband–inspired literary phase. Lacking company but content to be alone, he went to see plays at the Royal Court and the Playhouse, not enjoying it very much but still accumulating the knowledge he’d need if, as his father now hoped, he became an English teacher. Just as he didn’t only write songs but was aware of seeing himself in that songwriter image, so Paul was now consciously projecting the look of a deep thinker. He became the intellectual young man on the 86, thoughtfully puffing a pipe on the top deck while reading Under Milk Wood or Waiting for Godot, their titles visible. “I did most of my reading in [that] little period of my life … I thought it was a bit swotty, a good image … I felt like I was at university.” Paul went on ferries from the Pier Head with not only a book of poetry but also a pen and paper—“[I’d] think of myself as a bit of a poet, observ
ing people; sit on a bench and write a little about what I saw. I was very conscious of gathering material. I really fancied myself as an artist … my mind was full of it.”27 He also dropped into the nobs’ bookshop, the university-appointed Philip, Son & Nephew, which specialized in plays, poems and novels: when he could afford them, Paul bought intellectually weighty books; when he couldn’t, and if there was no one watching, he’d nick ’em.

  George Harrison was idling. No need now for the pretense of going into town every day simply to kill time—he could stay at home and do it. When he needed money he tapped his parents; as Louise would recall, “All I heard was ‘’eh Mum, lend us the bus fare, eh, and I’ll pay you back when I’m famous.’ ”28 If she was applying any force to his backside, to make him get out and get a job, it wasn’t shifting him; Harry kicked harder, and set up an interview and entrance exam with Liverpool Corporation for George to become an apprentice bus mechanic. It was the usual deal—he’d qualify with “a trade” after five years, in summer 1964. George loathed the very thought of it, but was in no position to refuse; yet it was a bittersweet moment when he found he’d failed the exam. He didn’t want the job but it was a jolt to his ego, an Institute boy failing where lads from secondary modern schools hadn’t. As he later reflected, “The people who went to work for the Corporation weren’t exactly the sharpest people around.”29