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

by Tim Riley

  John’s cousin Stanley Parkes remembers him having a cheap little harmonica that he played constantly, driving everyone crazy. On one of his bus trips up to Scotland, he played it the whole way, impressing the driver, who singled him out for praise when they arrived in Edinburgh. A previous passenger had left a harmonica on the bus some months back, he told John, who returned for it the following day. “He had it for years,” Parkes recalled, “and in fact he played it on some of his records. Eventually he took it to America and had it in the Dakota building in New York, I believe.”28

  At some point during this period, Stanley let John try out his own pint accordion. For Stanley, the instrument felt awkward, “like playing the piano sideways,” but John “strapped it on his shoulder and just took to it like a duck takes to water.” “How the heck did you do that,” Stanley cried. “ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I just do it.’ He took it home and he had it for quite a while.”29

  On this small keyboard, and later at Judy’s piano (and using only his right hand), Lennon taught himself to play the same songs that he’d learned to play on the mouth organ, middlebrow standards such as Alfven’s “Swedish Rhapsody,” the “Theme from Moulin Rouge,” “Greensleeves,” and a tune that later showed up in Beatle sets, “The Third Man Theme,” from the 1949 Carol Reed movie starring Orson Welles.30 Where Mimi would shush him up, at Judy’s place he could play harmonica and poke out tunes at the piano, to Judy’s delight. She even joined in with him. Why wouldn’t he feel like spending more time with her?

  Previous Beatle historians have placed a halo around Mimi’s head because she rescued the neglected John, gave his life structure and stability, and provided him with a kindly stepfather. Mimi was free to cast herself in this role, however, because she was the one telling the story—Julia Stanley Lennon didn’t live long enough to record her own version of events. And the reality turns out to be far more tangled. In Mimi’s mind, she’d loved John since he was born, rescued him from his hapless parents, and felt wounded when he began to display a preference for the mother who had abandoned him. Pete Shotton remembered growing rows between Lennon and his aunt once John began spending weekends at his mother’s, and the parental tug-of-war that had traumatized him when he was five escalated anew between the two Stanley sisters, who behaved very much like a divorced couple competing for their child.

  The more Mimi tried to reassert her dominance in his life, the longer John would stay over at his mother’s. After a big fight, Shotton said, “sometimes he’d inform his aunt he was ‘running away’ for good.”31 Mimi couldn’t help feeling slighted—she did all the work, Judy had all the fun—but her anger at John’s (quite natural) adolescent rebelliousness revealed a nasty side that long went unreported. One story in particular stands out. After “running away” to Judy’s for a few days, John returned to Mendips to discover that Mimi had retaliated by having his beloved dog, Sally, put down. Shotton recalled this as one of the few times he ever saw Lennon cry. According to Shotton, Mimi justified disposing of the healthy animal because John had vowed never to return to Mendips. “Since John wasn’t going to be around to walk the dog, she argued, he’d left her with no choice but to have it destroyed.”32

  “Looking back,” wrote Julia Baird, “I realize we became a refuge for John in his ever increasing struggle to live with Mimi amicably. Mimi, the aunt, was forced into the role of the heavy-handed mother, which allowed Julia, the mother, to become the indulgent aunt. Besides, at heart, Julia was still almost a teenager herself who easily identified with John and his friends.”33

  For John, after George’s death, Judy became something more than a respite from her martinet sister. Mother and son’s shared passion for the new, clandestine music hitting Radio Luxembourg led to an even stronger bond. Julia Baird remembers her mother as a “wonderful piano player,” “twice as musically talented than Lennon himself”—a pretty bold claim, even adjusting for a daughter’s hyperbole.34 In 1955, Judy strutted around as one of the few forty-two-year-old mothers who not only knew about rock ’n’ roll but proclaimed herself a fan. Like many parents, Mimi worried that rock ’n’ roll would corrupt her rebellious nephew into a “juvenile delinquent.” The fun-loving Judy named her cat Elvis.

  If you were a teenager and the music grabbed you, you picked up instruments and imitated the sounds you loved; Lennon’s gang was suddenly a band. Rod Davis remembers the lineup: “Bill Smith was on tea-chest; I played banjo; Eric Griffiths was on guitar; while Len Garry, Ivan Vaughan, Nigel Walley alternated on bass . . . Pete Shotton on washboard, and of course Lennon played guitar.” Vaughan went so far as to paint the words “Jive with Ive, the ace on the bass” on his washtub.35

  Shotton had qualms about joining; he didn’t have any talent, he claimed. “Well, John always wanted somebody next to him,” Len Garry remembers, “he always wanted some sort of support.”36 For Lennon, though, there was simply no question: musical ability counted far less than friendship. “Come on, don’t be daft,” he told Shotton. “Of course you can take part, anyone can.”37 Last to join was Colin Hanton, a trad jazz buff who played drums. As for singing, Lennon was always the lead; whatever the others lacked as musicians, he “could hold an audience.”38 And once he’d formed his first band, he behaved like the ultimate den mother: his devotion to the “group” long predated the Beatles.

  They called themselves the Black Jacks at first, with Lennon fronting in his Teddy Boy garb. After months of rehearsing, they made an appearance on the back of a flatbed truck on June 22, 1957. An early Lennon debut came, with afternoon and evening sets, during street celebrations for Empire Day, when Liverpool celebrated its 550th anniversary.39 According to Julia Baird, her mother helped fashion the Black Jacks’ wardrobe. She remembered the scene:

  We found John and his four friends perched up on a lorry parked across the middle of the street, playing their hearts out in a frenzy of rock and roll. . . . My mother was the group’s unofficial wardrobe mistress. She went to Garston open air market to buy the colored shirts they wore at that gig. The Teddy Boy look was the big fashion and they wore shoestring ties and took in their trousers to make them drainpipes. If their mothers could be talked into it, they got themselves DA [duck’s arse] haircuts.40

  The next month Pete Shotton’s mother, Bessie, a planning committee member at St. Peter’s, arranged for the band to play at the annual summer “Garden Fête” on Saturday, July 6. By that time they had settled on a more permanent name: the Quarrymen. This had simplicity, sounded tough enough, and referenced their school while snubbing the very idea of school spirit: Lennon’s reputation was such that nobody could presume they meant the band’s name as anything but a rebuke. The day-long event included a set on the back of another parade lorry, an afternoon set in the churchyard, and an evening dance.

  The scene is lovingly recreated in Jim O’Donnell’s fever-dream book The Day John Met Paul, a writer’s obsessive fleshing-out of the day’s few known details. Building on the foundations of a story that has long since entered the realm of myth, O’Donnell makes the plausible seem almost fated—as if a documentary film crew happened to be recording it all in the writer’s mind. The fifteen-year-old McCartney, a slender, dark-haired kid with soft features and twinkling brown eyes, came along at the behest of his friend Ivan Vaughan. McCartney remembers donning a “naff”—uncool—white jacket to impress the girls, inspired by Terry Dene’s hit that month, “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)”. He heard Lennon at the microphone singing “Come Go with Me” by the Del Vikings, a McCartney favorite from earlier that year. He remembers seeing the lead singer with his “curly, blondish hair, wearing a checked shirt—looking pretty good and quite fashionable.” According to his affectionate yet spotty memory, Lennon kept “forgetting the words” and making up nonsense on the spot to fill in the blanks:

  There’s a little refrain which goes, ‘Come little darlin’, come and go with me, I love you darling.’ John was singing, ‘Down, down, down to the penitentiar
y.’ He was filling in with blues lines, I thought that was good, and he was singing well. There was a skiffle group around him: tea-chest bass, drums, banjo, quite a higgledy-piggledy lot. . . . I quite liked them.41

  Rod Davis insists that McCartney remembers wrong: Lennon wasn’t making up lyrics, he was simply vamping on the final refrain as the song faded out, rhyming “penitentiary” with the original lyrics while they brought the song to an artificial fade-out. Lennon’s interest in the Del Vikings carries more significance. This biracial group from a Pittsburgh air force base combined doo-wop with rock ’n’ roll for a brew far beyond the scope of Donegan’s skiffle; the group’s doo-wop vocal arrangements soared over muscular R&B beats. By his second public performance, Lennon’s interests had progressed far past skiffle toward doo-wop, R&B, and rockabilly—the harder stuff. Other songs in the set included “Cumberland Gap,” “Freight Train,” “Midnight Special,” and “Worried Man Blues.” But this Del Vikings number conveys especially discriminating taste, both for what it signals about rock ’n’ roll’s development and how it pricked up McCartney’s ears. Lennon’s omnivorous listening habits already had moved the Quarrymen far from being a “mere” skiffle band.

  The music caught Mimi Smith’s ears as well: she was drawn to the “racket” and dumbstruck to see her charge fronting the noise in his “drainies” and ducktail. Lennon, seeing her coming, undermined her glare by ad-libbing: “Uh-oh, here comes Mimi down the path . . .” Mimi joined Judy in the crowd, one sister scowling, the other beaming.

  Between the afternoon set and the evening dance, Ivan introduced Paul to John, who seemed a bit tipsy to him (“breathing boozily”).42 Lennon feigned indifference when McCartney lit into Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” on Lennon’s guitar—which he’d turned upside down. Lennon was impressed, but didn’t let on just how much. Then McCartney dashed off a Little Richard medley, calling Lennon’s bluff: Lennon had just led his own band through its second public appearance, and here was some new kid from Allerton upstaging him with chords, tunings, and lyrics. The two briefly discussed fingerings (the left-handed McCartney deciphered the banjo-chord formations on Lennon’s right-hand guitar), and Paul cheerfully scribbled down Cochran’s words.

  Details surrounding this meeting remain in dispute. None of the surviving original Quarrymen, for instance, remembers Lennon, or anybody else, having anything to drink that day. “We wouldn’t have,” Colin Hanton says. “Where would we have gotten it? Nobody had any money.”43 And Rod Davis has no recollection of McCartney’s “white jacket,” which he’s sure would have made an impression. Here, perhaps, it’s McCartney’s mind that’s playing tricks: Lennon was twenty months his senior, after all, and the cockier presence, and he might have been acting smug and juiced just to put on a good front. As for McCartney’s white jacket, and the Terry Dene hit that was going through his head, these seem to have blurred together for an image nobody can confirm.

  That night’s dance was interrupted by a power outage and heavy rain. Pete Shotton remembered walking home during a vivid lightning storm. Lennon’s musical debut slammed up against Mimi’s certain scolding; Judy’s presence at that particular show would prove a talisman. The following week, following Lennon’s instructions, Pete Shotton spotted Paul on his bike and invited him to join the Quarrymen.

  PHOTO INSERT 1

  October 9, 1944. One of a series of forty-eight photos—shot in rapid succession—from a Polyfoto contact sheet, taken on John’s fourth birthday.

  Summer 1949. Rockferry, Cheshire. John with his mother, Julia, at the Ardmore house of her older sister Anne Georgina (“Nanny”).

  Summer 1949. In Nanny’s garden. From left to right: cousins Michael, Leila, David, half-sister Julia Baird (in hat), and John. John’s clothing suggests this was taken on the same day as the photo with his mother.

  Summer 1951. The Isle of Man. The Dovedale Primary School trip. Future comedian Jimmy Tarbuck has his fists raised while John stands just left of center.

  1950s. Liverpool. A rare photo of Aunt Mimi and Uncle George Smith in the backyard at Mendips. This is also one of the few photographs of Mimi laughing.

  June 6, 1957. Liverpool. The Quarrymen travel to the Woolton Parish Church Garden on the back of a lorry. From left to right: Eric Griffiths, Pete Shotton, Len Garry (standing), John Lennon, Colin Hanton, and Rod Davis (adjusting his glasses). This photo was discovered by Rod Davis in 2009 in a box of negatives shot by his father, James Davis.

  June 6, 1957. Liverpool. The Quarrymen play at the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete. From left to right: Eric Griffiths (guitar), Colin Hanton (in back, drums), Rod Davis (banjo), John Lennon, Pete Shotton (washboard), and Len Garry (tea-chest bass). Both Mimi and Julia attend this performance, one scowling, the other beaming. Later that day, Lennon meets Ivan Vaughan’s friend Paul McCartney.

  November 23, 1957. Liverpool. The Quarrymen at New Clubmoor Hall. From left to right: Colin Hanton, Paul McCartney, Len Garry, John Lennon, and Eric Griffiths.

  August 9, 1959. West Derby, Liverpool. The Quarrymen play the Casbah Coffee Club. As John focuses on his guitar, Paul wins a grin from Cynthia Powell (center, with dark hair).

  August 17, 1960. Holland. En route to Hamburg, everyone stops for a photo in front of the Arnhem War Memorial. From left to right: Allan and Beryl Williams, Lord Woodbine, Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best; John sleeps in the van.

  Autumn 1960. Hamburg, Germany. The Beatles on stage at the Indra Club. From left to right: Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John, and Pete Best.

  November 1960. Heiligengeistfeld Square, Hamburg. George, Stuart, and John in one of a series of brilliantly styled photos by Astrid Kirchherr.

  November 1960. Another of Astrid Kirchherr’s photos at Heiligengeistfeld Square, with Stuart in the background.

  Late 1960. Hamburg. Astrid Kirchherr snaps a picture of herself with fiancé Stuart Sutcliffe.

  June 1961. Hamburg. On stage at the Top Ten Club, John sings lead flanked by Stuart and George.

  Spring 1962. Hamburg. A formal Kirchherr portrait taken in her parents’ attic where Stuart Sutcliffe had made a studio for himself.

  August 22, 1962. The Cavern Club, Liverpool. The Beatles after Epstein put them in suits. Only in the sweltering basement club were they allowed to remove their jackets. Ringo, obscured behind Paul, had just joined the band on August 18. This day’s performance marked the first time television cameras filmed the Beatles, performing “Some Other Guy.” John married Cynthia the following day.

  Chapter 4

  Nobody Told Me

  McCartney played straight man to Lennon’s lunatic, the romantic to his skeptic, the “librarian” to his primitive. While there was always a power struggle over whose sensibilities would ultimately “define” the Beatles, with a chemistry beguiled by imbalance they began as fast friends, a bond created and fueled by the music’s riches. Lennon often acknowledged McCartney’s preeminence in technical proficiency, and McCartney immediately began sharing his notebooks with Lennon, intuiting a collaborator behind the bully.

  By itself, McCartney’s biography touches the tragic, but it positively glows against Lennon’s childhood. The McCartney family came from the village of Everton, the dense Liverpool suburb known as “Little Dublin,” named after the Irish refugees who had settled there by the 1880s. Like Lennon’s grandfather Jack Lennon Jr., Paul’s paternal grandfather, Joe McCartney, cut a musical profile in family lore. Joe played the E-flat bass horn, a cousin to the tuba, in the Territorial Army band at the outdoor concerts at Stanley Park in neighboring Anfield, and was an opera hound. Paul’s father, Jim, was one of Joe’s three sons and four daughters, and he played the trumpet, growing up to lead his own ragtime band, Jim Mac’s Jazz Band, at local clubs in the 1920s. He even wrote a song, “Walking in the Park with Eloise,” often requested at family house parties. At age fourteen, Jim went to work for A. Hannay & Co., the cotton traders, which became the Royal Cott
on Commission during the war. He would work there on and off for the next twenty-eight years.

  A confirmed bachelor at age thirty-six, Jim met a soft-spoken nurse, Mary Mohan, thirty-one, at his sister Jin’s house in West Derby Village in 1938.1 They married in 1941, at St. Swithin’s Roman Catholic Chapel in Gillmoss, West Derby, to please Mary’s Catholic parents. A lifetime teetotaler who went to bed promptly at ten each night, Jim moonlighted supervising garbage attendants to supplement the unsteady cotton trade. Mary supplemented his earnings working part-time as a midwife, riding her bike around town at all hours to deliver babies. It was a stressful life, with both parents working, but Mary’s “nurse sister” status at Walton Hospital qualified them for a government housing subsidy.

  The newlyweds moved to 92 Broadway in Wallasey, across the water from Liverpool. One year after their wedding, James Paul McCartney was born, on June 18, 1942. Another boy, Peter Michael, came along two years later. After a five-year series of moves, the McCartneys settled in at 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton for 6d a week, discounted for Mary’s hospital seniority. This home sat across the expansive golf course from Mendips, and less than a mile from where Judy had set up house with Bobby Dykins.