Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  * Konstantinovo, also known as Chveydan, and now called Kvedarna. The Epstein family of Liverpool pronounced their surname “Epsteen.”

  † There was no definitive way of writing the name—the Epsteins would use both NEMS and Nems. This book uses Nems unless otherwise necessary.

  ‡ Brian’s middle name came from Samuel Epstein, his great-grandfather, Isaac’s father.

  § The word “gay” was barely in use in this context at the time; the only alternatives to “homosexual” were crude and offensive.

  ‖ Number 2 control room was level with the studio, on the ground floor. It was relocated above in 1957, a long wooden staircase installed for access.

  a “George Martin produced the Goons” is a popular misconception. He was behind some Parlophone releases of BBC shows, and he recorded three of the Goons individually or in collaboration, but he didn’t produce them as a group—their collective recordings were on Decca.

  b Since the 1700s, Liverpool prostitutes had been known collectively as Maggie May, meaning “Maggie will.” The song is very similar—melodically, lyrically and structurally—to the American slavery song “Darling Nellie Gray” (written 1856), and it isn’t known definitively which came first.

  c The only calypso to score any success was “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” three versions of which popped into the NME Top Thirty at the beginning of March. This was the time when a 16-year-old boy in Liverpool, John Lennon, wrote “Calypso Rock,” his first song.

  d An earlier ad for the new shop (Echo, November 22; also, bizarrely, next to a Quarry Men ad) mentioned “television, radio and hi-fidelity equipment” as well as a “tremendous selection of all the newest labor saving devices for the home.” There was ample scope for business, especially by hire-purchase agreements. While the majority of British households now had a vacuum cleaner, only 18 percent had a washing machine and 8 percent a fridge.

  e Ronald Richard Pratley (1929–2009). He worked at Chappell and at Boosey & Hawkes as a song plugger, then joined Parlophone as a record plugger before moving into A&R. All of George Martin’s fellow EMI producers acquired assistants around this time.

  f Though records were bought almost entirely on the strength of their A-side, a royalty paid by record companies to the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) was distributed evenly to the composers and publishers of both sides.

  g In Forthlin Road, Paul and Mike McCartney “rolled around the floor” to Songs for Swingin’ Sellers and also thrilled to the cover photo: the Swingin’ element was shown by a man who’d hanged himself. The LP also included an Indian music send-up, with Sellers as Mr. Banajee, performing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” from My Fair Lady. (The recording brought sitar- and tabla-playing Indian musicians into Number 2 studio at Abbey Road for probably the first but certainly not the last time.) Banajee was possibly a parody of virtuoso Ravi Shankar, whose records in India were on Parlophone and who became the best-known Indian classical musician in Britain through several 1950s visits, often appearing on TV. Another visitor from “the subcontinent” was the bearded sage Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in Britain in December 1959 to explain his teaching of Transcendental Meditation. Years later, Paul would recall having seen him on Granada TV’s local news roundup People and Places.

  THIRTEEN

  JANUARY–MAY 1960

  “HI-YO, HI-YO, SILVER–AWAY!”

  The latest in the line of young men offered the chance to become Quarrymen bass player—always provided they bring their own bass—was Dave May, another art school student. John Lennon asked him because he was ready-equipped, albeit with a homemade guitar: he played it with Ken Dallas and the Silhouettes, a group of Buddy Holly fans from Bootle. May recalls seeing John, Paul and George strumming together in the empty Life Drawing room at college. Without bass and drums they were really just half a group. “They weren’t very good. In fact, they were really bad. John knew I played bass and asked if I fancied playing with them but I said, ‘Sorry, I’m in an established group, a good group.’ Another reason I didn’t fancy it was that John had his own ideas and his own thoughts, and they were such a gang of rebels. They didn’t care about anything.”1

  The suggestion that Stuart Sutcliffe buy a bass and join them had been floated before, when it probably dissolved in a pool of cackles: he had no money, little musical ability and was no rocker. But then, in what was nothing less than a miracle of timing, the first obstacle disappeared—and others were swiftly kicked over—when ninety whole pounds suddenly came his way.

  During the first or second week of 1960, as The John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 2 drew to a close at the Walker Art Gallery, Moores expressed an interest in buying Stuart’s exhibited abstract, Summer Painting. Whether or not the millionaire benefactor realized it was only half the true work is no more known than it was apparent. Stuart agreed to its sale and soon had £90 burning a hole in his pocket.2 To him as to his friends, this was a vast sum, nine or ten times the weekly wage for many a working man. No sooner had Stuart deposited the check in his Liverpool Savings Bank account than certain of these friends were whispering urgently in his ear about how best it should be spent.

  As George Harrison later remembered, they were quite nice about it: they gave Stuart the choice of drums or bass.3 They weren’t fussed—they needed both. They got him squeezed around a table one night at the Casbah and pressed home the point while supping coffees frothed for them by Rory Best. Pete’s younger brother can still visualize “Stuart sort of hemmed in the corner. John and Paul wouldn’t take no for an answer, even though Stuart kept saying it.”4

  If it was to be anything it would be the bass, Stuart said, but he had major reservations, not least because he’d never touched one in his life. The prospect of plucking one, of being in a group, of the disciplined learning of songs—chords, keys and tempos—and of performing in front of people, this was a major move for someone who’d never expressed any such interest. John, Paul and George had been talking chords and harmonies and what was “great” about this song and “crap” about that for years; Stuart hadn’t. And being in a rock group was guaranteed to be seen by his parents and family, his teachers and fellow pupils as mad, reckless, beneath his class, a wasteful frittering of his perhaps-once-in-a-lifetime windfall.

  John could be relentlessly persuasive, however, and his friendship with Stu had become central to them both. As fellow student Helen Anderson says, “Though it was strange that Stuart got diverted away from his painting, he was completely carried away with John.”5 Of equal strength too, Stuart simply fancied it: he was curious about how it would be to play in a rock group, to pose with a guitar and look cool, to project that image.

  So it was that Stuart Sutcliffe stepped into Frank Hessy’s on January 21, 1960, and picked out a Hofner 333 four-string bass, plus carrying case. He put down £15 cash and signed up to a weekly drip repayment that would extend into 1961 and bring the total price to £59 15s.6 It was a big guitar—Paul says it “dwarfed him”7—and with this he was now in the Quarrymen. What, though, had Stuart joined? A group of four guitarists with one amplifier, no drummer, no bookings, no manager, no prospects, and a name they hated. If they’d been on the verge of great things then Stuart’s entrée might just have made some sense; as it was, he’d splashed some of his bumper bundle on not much more than a vision.*

  Days before he did this, on probably January 9 or 16, the Quarrymen’s long Saturday-night residency at the Casbah Coffee Club ground to a halt. This particular week Ken Brown wasn’t well and didn’t feel up to playing—he spent most of the evening quietly taking admission money on the door. It didn’t bother John, Paul and George, so long as he let them use his amp. At the end of the night, though, Mrs. Best insisted on giving Ken his usual quarter of the group’s £3 fee. John, Paul and George said no, they should get a pound each. Two intractable forces met square-on.

  It’s never been said if John, Paul and George told Mrs. Best where she could stick her Casbah, or whether they just accid
entally failed to show up the following week; what is certain is that they didn’t go back. Evidently, they were prepared to walk out on their only booking and source of income. It could also be that the argument was a device to sever the tie with Ken Brown. They were just about to get a bass player and so would have numbered five guitarists. No drummer, five guitarists? Something had to give, and it would be Ken. He knew it, which was why he’d already started playing with the Blackjacks. The Quarrymen barely gave him another thought after he’d gone, save for the important fact that they missed his amplifier. These four electric guitarists now had only Paul’s little two-input Elpico between them. It could be that some further pressure was applied to Stuart at this time—something about also buying an amp?—but if there was then he resisted it.

  They did, however, find a new place to dwell. Just before Christmas 1959, the landlady at 9 Percy Street made a snap inspection of Rod Murray and Stuart Sutcliffe’s rooms. As Rod remembers, “She saw a table-leg burning in the grate in mine—I hadn’t realized it was antique but she claimed it was—and then she went upstairs to Stuart’s room, found that all the furniture was painted and that the fireplace was missing—we’d used that for firewood too—and she evicted us.”8 Served with a month’s notice, the pair hunted for a new place and found one on Gambier Terrace, a first-floor flat facing the art school and the vast hilltop Anglican Cathedral.

  The unfurnished Flat 3, Hillary Mansions, Gambier Terrace, was more spacious than any the pair had shared before. It had a large living room/bedroom at the front, a second bedroom at the rear that doubled as an art studio, a third, smaller bedroom, a kitchen, a hall, a toilet and a bathroom with a gas-heated water geyser. The weekly £3 rent was affordable if Rod and Stuart found others to join them: a pair of girls came in from the art school—Margaret Morris and Margaret Duxbury, known as Diz and Ducky (Rod and Diz soon paired up)—and then, probably a short while after moving in, Stuart invited John to share the studio room. It was the moment John Lennon had been waiting for.

  John’s brittle accord with Aunt Mimi had gone far beyond breaking point. Both were still struggling to cope with Julia’s terrible death, and John had never properly replaced the bolt-hole that was Julia’s house whenever he felt Mimi bearing down on him, which was most of the time. She was still clutching at vanishing straws, hoping to make him stick to his studies during another vital year in his education. If he bombed out, then what? Cynthia Powell says Mimi “did her utmost to squash” John’s plans, but in the end he simply couldn’t be stopped.9

  John’s move into a flat was a godsend for his and Cyn’s sex life: privacy at last, freedom from prying eyes and moral barriers, whole nights together instead of snatched moments. When Cyn stayed over at Gambier she told her mother she was with her friend Phyllis; Lil Powell remained dead set against her daughter’s relationship—it had been running six months but nothing yet had happened to encourage her to think better of John Lennon. Because of him, Cynthia was out late several nights a week “over the water” doing who-knew-what, and she was turning from a respectable, soberly dressed college student into a vamp. John was modeling Cyn into his very own Brigitte Bardot, perennial object of his sex fantasies. Her mousey hair went blonde through the application of Hiltone bleach, and she wore black short skirts, black fishnet stockings and garters, black tight sweaters and pointed high-heeled shoes.

  As much as she appreciated the new opportunities presented by Gambier Terrace, Cyn was appalled by the state of the flat. Outwardly, the building was a grand 1830s colonnade built for the mercantile rich, with a stunning Doric porch. It was (and still is) the most handsome terrace of its kind in all Liverpool, manifestly a world away from the slums and back-to-back houses with their outdoor privies—though actually all that was only a few hundred yards away: Liverpool 8 started just beyond the terrace. Even closer to home, though, the building’s beauty ended at the front door. Beyond the threshold those high ceilings and cavernous rooms gave way, in terms of decor, to a shambles. Stuart’s and John’s studio room was plain filthy: a couple of camp-beds on splinter-shedding floorboards, no curtains, grubby windows and a fireplace full of soot, cigarette butts and fish-and-chip papers, everything marooned in painting materials and accumulating daily debris. If they didn’t use the fire there was no other heating, and Cyn had to invent reasons for returning home “from a night with Phyllis” not just looking like a floozy but a smudged floozy.

  As the registered tenant, Rod Murray paid the rent and had to collect it in turn from his occupants. John was blessed with a particular talent for frittering away his funds (the council grant designed to provide his working materials) and was rarely in a position to pay. As Rod remembers, “During the week I’d go and have a pint with him and he’d always have money for a beer, but when it came to the day to pay the rent he was always hard up. ‘Could I owe it to you?’ ‘Would you like this jacket?’ One time he paid me with a check Mounties-type Canadian jacket he’d probably nicked from someone else.”

  Though they had no bookings, the Quarrymen needed to rehearse. Stuart—John, Paul and George all called him Stu†

  —worked hard to learn his instrument: Cyn says he spent “every spare moment practicing, hoping for words of praise from John.” John helped coach him, which was something like the blind leading the blind: he was never a technical guitarist and didn’t know the bass. George says they taught Stu to play twelve-bar and that the first tune he learned was Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days.” Dave May was roped in to show Stu a thing or two and in return was allowed to measure up the Hofner 333, which was so much better than the model for his existing homemade bass. He showed Stu how to play Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody,” which entailed learning three notes.10

  When George joined John’s group two years earlier he’d objected to its “surplus” members, but he had no problems with Stu’s presence, despite his lack of ability. George just wanted the group to get off the ground—“It was better to have a bass player who couldn’t play than to not have a bass player at all”—and he’d liked Stu from the start.11 Almost 17, George was now settling into working life at Blackler’s, but he hated the daily grind.

  Stu’s position in the group did not sit well with Paul, however, whose objection ran on two fronts. First, though he’d helped encourage Stu to join, he couldn’t really see the point of taking on a bass player who couldn’t play bass. It wasn’t the only time John had brought an unmusical close mate into his group, but Pete Shotton’s inability had been no particular disadvantage in the skiffle days. Now, at a time when other local rock groups existed on a higher plane, and the Quarrymen patently had to improve, it was nonsensical to shackle themselves to someone who didn’t know his instrument.

  Paul’s second objection was more visceral, and sometimes masked by the first. He quickly became jealous of Stu’s relationship with John. He felt edged out, rejected, hurt. A fourth player might normally be expected to join a group in fourth position, but Stu came in nearer the top, perhaps even second, and Paul was pushed down. He’d staked the primary claim to John since the end of 1957 and now slipped down the chart. Before, he would sit next to John on the bus, with George alone in the seat behind. Now, John and Stu sat together and Paul was in the back with the boy nine (or so) months younger.12

  John had engineered this situation; it was by his actions that dissent was in the air, but Paul couldn’t be angry with him, only with Stu—so it was Stu who got Paul’s snippy remarks and general behavior that in one way or another cut the ground from under him. John, as usual, observed it and did nothing: it was for Stu to defend himself, if he wanted to. It seems Stu mostly ignored it. Sometimes, John even joined in, and Stu ignored that too. (John had again chosen someone who stood up to him.)

  Mixing now not only with John but Stu and his Gambier Terrace flatmates, Paul was ever more intent on projecting the appearance of a university scholar—smoking a pipe and reading manifestly impressive books at the bus stop. So limitless was Paul’s ambiti
on, he could stand under the Mather Avenue bus shelter, huddled next to the shopping biddies, and imagine himself enormously famous, fabulously wealthy and honored by his country. “I always had a good imagination. I dreamed of everything standing by the bus stop reading Room at the Top. I [would] always think ‘Lord Allerton …’ It sounded great. I never thought it would happen in a million years.”13

  There came a point in early 1960, though, when all Paul’s lofty daydreams must have seemed sunk.

  Dot Rhone loved being Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. He was unusual and a cut above other boys: much better-looking, brighter, sharper, musically gifted, an entertaining mimic. It did entail acquiescing to a few demands—as she recalls, he didn’t want her to see any of her friends, he didn’t want her to smoke (though he did), and he copied John by insisting on her adoption of the Brigitte Bardot look, the black clothes and blonde hair: “He gave me a list of rules that I had to stick to. John had the same rules for Cynthia.”14

  A virgin when they started going out, Dot didn’t stay one for long, and perhaps around February 1960 she discovered she was pregnant; the baby was due in September or October. Paul was 17 and still in school, Dot was 16. Jessie Rhone, her mother, was appalled by Dot’s behavior and worried what people would think. Dot relates that her mother decided she must spend the latter pregnancy period with her sister in Manchester and have the baby adopted there at birth, but that Paul offered marriage instead and said she and the baby could join his dad and brother at Forthlin Road. Only those who needed to know were told (Cynthia never knew it), and the situation entered a fraught period during which every aspect of Paul’s future was hanging by a thread.

  Liverpool’s top group, particularly in terms of ambition and presentation, were Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Their booking at the Cavern’s Jazz Festival in January 1960—a peculiar spot: they played rock, and were pelted with pennies—was just the latest of several highish-profile engagements, enough to earn them a local-lads-make-good piece in the Reporter series of newspapers in the north and east of the city.15 Each member was profiled in turn and the name Ringo Starr appeared in the press here for the first time. In contrast to the others’ sporty attributes (Rory played football, swam great distances, did cross-country running and trialed as a middle-distance runner for the 1960 British Olympic team), there really wasn’t much to be said about the drummer, except “He is saving to get married, and his spare time is spent in making plans.” One such strategy, Johnny Guitar would always remember, entailed Richy’s religious conversion, from Protestant to Catholic, to satisfy Gerry’s family’s demands about how they would raise their children. Elsie wasn’t at all happy about this and it wasn’t in her nature to keep quiet, telling him, “You’ll never have any luck if you marry a Catholic.”‡