Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  “What McDermott really wants is a class full of fucking vicars,” Lennon told Shotton. “Why not give it to him?” Together they cut forty cardboard “dog collars” out of cereal boxes and gave one to every student in his class. That day McDermott came in, opened his briefcase, pulled out his papers, and started to read “in his boring religious voice.” When he finally looked up at his class, he froze, dropping his jaw midsentence. “And then he laughs and laughs and laughs,” Shotton remembered. “His enormous frame shakes so much I thought he’d have a seizure. ‘That was terrific, boys,’ he says. ‘What a prank.’ He enjoyed it so much he made us keep on our dog collars for the rest of the lesson.”34

  As he began having his head, Lennon skipped class often. On his 1956 Christmas report card, where the “absent” marks go right down the page, his math teacher, Mr. Nixon—known as “Old Nick,” according to Rod Davis—wrote: “Term mark: 17 percent. If he continues like this, this boy’s bound to fail!” Davis explains how this remark got misinterpreted: “So this is December 1956, and in July he’s going to be taking his maths GCE exam, right? [It’s] a perfectly reasonable statement to make after all these absences!” But that “bound to fail” remark proved irresistible to biographers. Lennon himself bandied it around with interviewers, and it’s trailed him ever since.

  Lennon lumped Quarry Bank into his larger story about his troubles with Aunt Mimi and his restless adolescence. But some of his school friends argue that it wasn’t so bad and that Lennon painted his Quarry Bank teachers with a very broad brush. “Many of them had served in the war and were wonderful characters and storytellers,” Davis recalled, citing a math teacher named Fred Yule, “who had been a bomber navigator and sported a metal leg which creaked so that you could hear him coming for some distance! He was so strong that he once lifted Lennon clean off the ground by his lapels!”35

  Despite his carefree attitude, Lennon paid more attention than he let on. Convinced he was smarter than the snobs who controlled his days, Lennon resolved to drop out of school as soon as he could. In the meantime, in an offhanded way, he designed his own program of education—reading, drawing, and soaking up knowledge from the emergent pop culture of Liverpool and Britain in the 1950s. His Quarry Bank grades and teachers’ notes show high marks in History and Geography.36 Moreover, Pobjoy, the Quarry Bank headmaster, became John’s chief advocate in getting him into art college after graduation despite being, along with the teachers, the occasional target of Lennon’s caricatures. Davis recalled an annual fair at St. Peter’s where the Quarry Bank boys were operating booths. “John had done these drawings of the teachers. . . . If you got three darts on your favorite master, you won something. These caricatures were absolutely brilliant. I’ve got a copy of the Sunday Express magazine which has copies of these, and they are still brilliant when you look at them now. And this was when he was in fourth year!”

  Lennon always spoke about how marginalized he felt, and how few teachers seemed to believe in him. But Davis thinks this gets overblown: Lennon received high marks when he paid attention, and many enjoyed his cartoons and practical jokes. Davis insists the teachers felt conflicted about Lennon. At Quarry Bank, “everybody considered themselves part of the ‘top slice,’ the most promising young minds with the most promising futures.” The faculty, he says, “couldn’t very well encourage his rebellions—otherwise, the entire fabric of what was going on would fall apart.” Reigning cultural mores simply didn’t allow them to reward his antics. Davis chortles when he remembers how they felt: “Apart from locking him up, there wasn’t a lot they could do with him!”37

  Chapter 3

  She Said She Said

  Lennon’s teenage years paralleled Britain’s postwar penury. Rock ’n’ roll was not quite a rumor on the English music scene. The Marshall Plan had swept into Europe in 1948, resurrecting the Continent and rebuilding destroyed cities, but Britain hardly shared in its bounty. With war debt still dragging on the economy, interest rates held at punitive. The country was barely able to service its existing obligations, never mind borrow more for rebuilding. As historian Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times:

  The war had cost [the UK] $30 billion, a quarter of her net wealth. She had sold $5 billion of foreign assets and accumulated $12 billion of foreign debts. America had given her a post-war loan, but this did not cover the gap in her trade—exports in 1945 were less than a third of the 1938 figure—nor her outgoings as a slender pillar of stability in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.1

  At the same time, in response to international pressure, Britain began dismantling its empire, which meant writing off revenues from former colonies. Struggling to mend its battered cities and absorbing the loss of a previous generation’s imperial glory, the British populace experienced the first decade after the war as a time of prolonged shortages. The shelling had stopped, but food rationing continued until 1954. During the same period—the years between Lennon’s move into Mimi Smith’s house and his embrace of rock ’n’ roll ten years later—the United States experienced an unprecedented level of economic expansion, giving American teenagers more free time and more cash to spend on their own amusement. Teens in postwar Britain, however, suffered privation far removed from the American boom. This cultural gap had profound effects on how early rock ’n’ roll history played out.

  The underfunded, state-run British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) didn’t even launch a television news service until 1954. Only in 1955 did England finally see glimmers of an economic resurgence similar to the one broadcast from the United States. That same year, the Independent Television Network (ITV) was launched, with the aim of providing more lively, up-to-date, and entertaining programming. Still, at that time, only 30 percent of Britons owned television sets (compared to more than 50 percent in the U.S.), and working- and lower-middle-class kids in Liverpool families were not among them. Luckily for John, Pete Shotton’s policeman father had bought one of the first televisions in the neighborhood, and Pete lived only one block over, on Vale Road. The 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth would be the medium’s first broadcast event in England well before any boom.

  This postwar privation caused British adolescents to experience the mid-1950s rock explosion much differently from their American counterparts. The BBC Light Programme played mainstream standards, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and occasional big band music, but Liverpool ears sought out many more styles than dreamt of by the BBC. If anything, its bustling seaport resembled the Memphis train junction, with new products and influences streaming in daily. Once a haven for hundreds of thousands of Irish fleeing the great potato famine and a hub for slave traders during the mid-nineteenth century, Merseyside also housed Europe’s first Chinatown. “Liverpool is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it’s where black people were left or worked as slaves or whatever,” Lennon remembered. “We were a great amount of Irish descent and blacks and Chinamen, all sorts.”2

  This polyglot culture sprouted diverse and lively entertainments. American sailors on the Cunard lines brought in early rhythm-and-blues and country-and-western records to sell on the black market in advance of European distributors.3 In his book Magical Mystery Tours, Tony Bramwell, George Harrison’s friend who became a Beatle publicist, describes huge weekend record swaps near the docks. Americans stationed at the nearby Burtonwood base invited locals into their homes to drink Coca-Cola and spin American records on their turntables.4 “All the girls would head up to Burtonwood for the dances,” Quarrymen drummer Colin Hanton remembered.5 Travelers also brought back European releases of American music that had not yet been picked up by British labels. Lennon had strong memories of Liverpool’s country-and-western scene, and knew about the local folk and blues clubs well before the rock ’n’ roll tide came in. By 1955, Liverpudlians had already been exposed to a dense variety of cultural influences. As a result, they boasted the least parochial taste in Britain, and their Scouser pride celebrated stylistic variety. “The people there—” Len
non said, “the Irish in Ireland are the same—they take their music very seriously.” 6

  In this atmosphere, alternative radio became a pipeline to the American scene. Radio Luxembourg, launched in 1931 to play military band music and passed through Nazi and then Allied hands during and after the war, transformed itself in the 1950s. Its 208-meter wavelength (“2-0-8 Power Play”) couldn’t reach far beyond Germany during the day, but at night the signal had greater reach, and much of the UK could tune in. The station began broadcasting a 7 P.M. English service in 1950. Against the BBC’s relatively meager light fare, it stood out as the only signal that carried American R&B, country, and rock ’n’ roll. Nobody with the slightest interest in music could live without it, and its oracular nighttime-only reception gave it the insider status of an “offshore,” or pirate, station.

  There’s not much mentioned when it comes to Aunt Mimi’s taste in music; like a lot of parents of her generation, she simply thought guitars were so much “noise.” Her sister Judy, however, ran wires connecting her gramophone to remote speakers in different rooms of her home—commonplace now but unheard of at the time. Lennon copied this setup at Mendips, stringing wire from the living-room radio up to his bedroom, where he installed a speaker so he could listen to adventurous DJs like Jimmy Savile and Jack Jackson on Radio Luxembourg at night.7

  Listening to Radio Luxembourg, Lennon heard whispers of the emergent rock ’n’ roll style during the spring of 1955, just as it began to surface in the United States. Lennon’s and the UK’s introduction to early rock ’n’ roll, however, came through the unlikely figure of Lonnie Donegan, a Scottish banjo player and guitarist from Chris Barber’s jazz band. During intermissions, Donegan organized a small “skiffle” combo to entertain audiences (Barber, a trombonist, sat in on upright bass or harmonica). Skiffle (derived from “skiffle party,” a synonym for “rent party”) grew out of the original Dixieland and ragtime styles to turn common household items into instruments, typically an old-fashioned wooden washboard strummed in time with a sewing thimble, along with a guitar and a harmonica. (If you were really fancy, you could add drums.) The style enjoyed a couple of stateside hits following World War I, with Jimmy O’Bryant and the Chicago Skifflers, and a brief revival from Dan Burley and His Skiffle Boys, featuring guitarists Brownie and Stick McGhee, in 1948. Through Donegan, this stateside novelty style enjoyed its first and only craze.

  In late 1954, Donegan recorded a skiffle version of the American blues singer Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line.” Drained of Leadbelly’s authority, Donegan’s cover sparked an infectious, do-it-yourself spirit that British teens responded to. The skinny style sounded completely unpretentious and winning, as if its jumping rhythms could leap tall buildings, with no pretense at skill, unlike all the stuffy orchestras and big-band arrangements the BBC played. Released in early 1955 as a 45 rpm extended-play (EP) single, along with Donegan’s cover of another Leadbelly track, “John Henry,” and Royal Festival Hall concert recordings of “I Don’t Care Where They Bury My Body” and “Digging My Potatoes,” it conquered the UK charts, selling three million copies in six months. Stranger still, “Rock Island Line” leapt clear across the pond to reach number eight in America in March 1956.

  Donegan’s lighthearted audience rapport and bouncing rhythms set off a run on Britain’s guitars and unused washboards. Perhaps the UK required something tamer than Elvis to make way for rock’s more aggressive rhythms; perhaps the protracted effort to market Elvis worldwide simply delayed his impact. At the time, it turned Donegan into a major UK star; history has since cast him in the role of England’s John the Baptist.

  In Barber’s jazz lineup, Donegan played the banjo, but he switched to guitar for skiffle. Lennon took note of that connection. Julia had taught him the banjo, so here was the leap to guitar made plain: if you could play one, you could play the other. Donegan had simply gone in the opposite direction: “Chris Barber wanted me to join him on banjo, so I bought one,” Donegan remembered. “He said ‘Put your fingers in the middle and do something.’ ”8

  Although not much of a looker, Donegan helped himself to clothes from his previous job as a department-store window dresser.9 Fan enough to adopt a black musician’s name (pianist Lonnie Johnson, for whom Donegan had opened back in 1952), he played the dandy without the looks, and a lot of his appeal lay in how he defined himself against current norms. “If he looked like a used car salesman offstage,” wrote rock historian Alan Clayson, “[he] could be mesmeric in concert, creating true hand-biting excitement as he piled into numbers his group didn’t know; took on and resolved risky extemporizations, and generated a sweaty, exhilarating intensity.”10 “Puttin’ On the Style,” a 1926 number he put out in 1957, sketched this persona out and became an early teen dress-up anthem: “She’s putting on the agony, putting on the style/That’s what all the young folks are doing all the while.”

  Upward of five thousand skiffle groups formed in the UK during 1955 and 1956. Even Mick Jagger, who would later deny it, got his start as a member of the Barber-Colyer Skiffle Band in London, when Chris Barber lost Donegan to a solo career and started another group. Van Morrison joined Belfast’s Sputniks.11 The almost fourteen-year-old Paul McCartney and the thirteen-year-old George Harrison both heard Donegan perform at Liverpool’s Empire Theatre in May 1956, at the height of his popularity; McCartney waited by the stage door to get Donegan’s autograph, and the star’s personable demeanor with fans made a lasting impression.12

  In Britain, Donegan’s influence is hard to overstate: he had eight top-thirty UK hits in 1956 stores, and twenty-two more before 1962, ranging from Woody Guthrie material like “Grand Coulee Dam” to Leadbelly’s “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie” and Riley Puckett and Gid Tanner’s 1924 “Cumberland Gap.” The following year brought the novelty “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It’s [sic] Flavor (on the Bedpost Over Night)?” (from a 1924 hit by Billy Jones and Ernest Hare) and a cover of the Carter Family’s “My Dixie Darling.” The Carters’ country-and-western connection is tied in with skiffle’s do-it-yourself ethos: skiffle groups were originally called “spasm bands” when they surfaced in New Orleans. You had to have chops to play trad jazz, but skiffle offered the immediate gratification of a style anybody could copy, and washboards and tea chests were just lying around people’s houses. Quarryman Hanton remembers more music shops getting robbed than jewelers.13 “The question wasn’t ‘is your brother in a skiffle band?’ ” Julia Baird recalled, “it was ‘which skiffle band is he in?’ ”14

  Lennon bought and cherished “Rock Island Line,” one of his first records, a prized possession that he eventually passed on to his Quarry Bank schoolmate Rod Davis. Julia Baird remembers, “My father’s big wind-up gramophone was the highlight of social evenings at home. That’s how Jacqui, John and I first became acquainted with the strange new music from America called rock ’n’ roll, which the local seamen had brought back with them.”15 Rock’s early mysteries unfolded through coded slang, borrowed from black rhythm and blues, which suddenly took on new meanings among a wider, and younger, audience. The music cut a swath through the world, separating teenagers from adults, hips from squares, those who heard the call and those it baffled. This introduced a new layer of complication between Judy, who “got it,” and her sister Mimi, who didn’t—and never would.

  In the middle of this battle, one figure remained constant: George Smith, John’s most important ally as a child. Then, abruptly, one Sunday in June of 1955, George collapsed and was rushed to Sefton Hospital, diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. He died the next day from a brain hemorrhage at the age of fifty-two. Nobody, apparently, so much as suspected that George was ill. Although he must have been in chronic pain for months before he died, he hid his ailment from those who loved him most. John, four months short of his fifteenth birthday, had just left for his summer holiday in Scotland. He turned around immediately and headed home. His cousin Leila, sixteen at the time, traveled back with him, and later described the scene to J
ulia Baird: “It was a terrible shock to us all, but especially to John who looked on him as a father. . . . He and John always had little secrets going on between the two of them. He was so affectionate. John always used to insist on giving him ‘squeakers,’ his name for kisses, before George put him to bed.”16

  None of the reports of George’s sudden death address the causes of his cirrhosis, but the likelihood is that he, like John’s paternal grandfather, Jack Lennon Jr., died from alcoholic liver disease, still one of the leading causes of mortality throughout the world. Whatever his failings, George Smith’s love for his nephew was one of the few uncomplicated attachments of Lennon’s early life. When Mimi sent John up to his room for misbehaving, it was George who would tiptoe up with cake to leave by his door to smooth things over. When John was older, George sneaked him off to the movies despite Mimi’s disapproval. George, the more passive personality in the house, had long since replaced Alf as his father figure.

  As relatives started to stream through for Smith’s funeral, John hid upstairs in his bedroom with Leila, giggling hysterically rather than crying. This eruption, now treated as a perfectly “normal” grief response, tormented his conscience for years. To have good relations with a “stepfather” was triumph enough for a boy whose father had left him at age five. And George, quiet in his influence but a kind and merry man, had loved him unconditionally, made few demands on him, and protected him from his aunt’s harsh and unpredictable temper. Compounding John’s pain, Alfred Lennon reappeared briefly during this phase and contacted his son to suggest a meeting. Pete Shotton reported that John was “electrified by the prospect of encountering [his father] face to face—and felt cruelly cheated when the plans ultimately fell through.” Thereafter, John rarely spoke of him “except to note, without any apparent resentment, that his old man had ‘run away to sea.’ ”17