The loss of George’s kindly, understanding masculine influence could not have come at an unluckier time, with John poised on the edge of adolescence and clamoring for information, advice, and reassurance. Sex education did not feature on Quarry Bank’s syllabus, and Mimi could not be interrogated on such matters in other than the most general and theoretical terms. Like most of his generation, John had to piece together the facts of life from dirty jokes and diagrams on the walls of public urinals.
It was still almost universally believed that masturbation called down the same heavenly wrath as the Old Testament’s Onan suffered for “letting his seed fall on the ground.” Boys who wanked, tossed off, beat their meat, pulled their wire, or gave themselves a hand-shandy did so at the supposed risk of going blind, growing hair on their palms, or being permanently shut away in psychiatric institutions. As a Boy Scout, John had been bombarded with such warnings via Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys manual, with its puzzling metaphors about rutting stags and its advocacy of fresh air and exercise to stave off any inclination to “beastliness.”
He became a dedicated wanker, undeterred by any fear of heavenly retribution and, as always, in company with his arch-crony, Pete Shotton. It was a further symbol of their closeness, without any suggestion of the homoerotic; they wanked together as an act of Shennon-Lotton rebellion and defiance and mutual showing off. John proved to have a particular aptitude and near-inexhaustible stamina. Once, he accepted Pete’s challenge to do it ten times in a single day, the prize being unlimited access to the Shotton family’s television set. He failed to reach this target, but only by one go.
The wider circle of Lennon followers would also sociably wank all together, stimulating themselves and their neighbors by shouting out the names of sex goddesses like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida. Sometimes at the critical moment, John would call out “Winston Churchill” or “Frank Sinatra,” and the onanists would collapse into giggles.
As if there were not enough going on in 1955 already, Britain’s wankers were presented with a riveting alternative to “tit” magazines like Spick and Span. Twenty-one-year-old Brigitte Bardot, already well known to French cinemagoers, made her first English-language film, Doctor at Sea, and changed every preconception of sexuality on the big screen. Whereas conventional Hollywood sirens like Ava Gardner or Lana Turner were remote, untouchable, and curiously ageless, Bardot seemed hardly more than a schoolgirl with her startled-doe eyes and dimpled chin, as dewily innocent as she was knowingly voluptuous. Her very nickname, “the sex kitten,” was almost enough to bring her overheated young British admirers to spontaneous orgasm. John became obsessed by her, cutting her picture from a magazine and pasting it to the ceiling above his bed.
He was by now intensely aware of the strong sexual atmosphere between his mother and “Twitchy” Dykins at 1 Blomfield Road. Once, as he would always remember, he accidentally walked into their bedroom while Julia was fellating Dykins, half-covered by a sheet. As his hormones began to run riot, he also became increasingly conscious of Julia’s physical allure, the more so as she had always treated him in a jokey, flirtatious manner, more like a sportive young aunt. One afternoon when he was playing truant from Quarry Bank as usual, he lay on her bed next to her as she took an afternoon rest. He never forgot what she was wearing: “a black Angora short sleeved round-necked sweater, not too fluffy, maybe it was that other stuff, Cashmere, soft wool anyway, and, I believe, that tight dark green and yellow mottled skirt.” As they lay there, he accidentally touched Julia’s breast, “and I was wondering if I should do anything else. It was a strange moment because at the time I had the hots, as they say, for a rather lower-class female who lived on the opposite side of the road. I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.”
Early that summer, Ivy Vaughan asked one of his classmates at Liverpool Institute, a lanky, humorous boy named Len Garry, to come and meet John and the Woolton gang. Len agreed but did not rush to take up the invitation: he had several more-pressing social commitments, among them cinemagoing with another Institute classmate, Paul McCartney.
Finally Len made the trip from his Wavertree home on the bicycle he’d been given for passing his Eleven Plus. He met Ivy walking along Vale Road toward Menlove Avenue in a little group that also included John. He recalls: “John had a piece of paper in his hand that he was showing to the others. When Ivan introduced us, he didn’t say much, just gave me a look. I got the feeling I was being weighed up.”
The newcomer quickly proved himself made of the right stuff. He was an aficionado of William books and the Goons, he knew the words to Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine songs, and, as a bonus, could reproduce the hideously drawn-out jungle cry of Tarzan the Ape Man as portrayed in films by Johnny Weissmuller. It wasn’t long before John felt sufficiently at ease with Len to show him the piece of paper that the others had been passing around and chortling over. This was not just a drawing but a miniature newspaper singlehandedly written and illustrated by John. Entitled “The Daily Howl,” it consisted of gossip-style paragraphs, single cartoons, and comic strips, hand-lettered, ruled, and colored with all their creator’s usual extracurricular care. There were running jokes about celebrities like Fred Emney, Stanley Unwin, and the bald TV magician David Nixon; about John’s own middle name of Winston; and, inevitably, about black people and “cripples,” some phrases being phoneticized (“Thik ik unk,” for instance, meaning “This is a”) to signify a speech impediment. Despite all the work that went into each edition, their author kept “Daily Howls” coming at the rate of several per week.
Len Garry joined the group of bike riders that John led like a squadron of cavalry around the quiet Woolton lanes, looking for girls to chat up. Almost invariably, this feminine quarry would also be out with bikes and also dressed in school uniforms but, by the game’s unwritten rules, walking and pushing rather than riding. Between cavalry and giggling infantry, sooner or later, the right signal would be sent and answered, and the varicolored school blazers and bikes would come together.
John was not good-looking in any conventional sense, with his slanted eyes and plunging beak of a nose. Yet he invariably proved the most successful, both in the chatting-up ritual and the encounters that followed. When the riders compared notes later, it would be John who described feeling right inside a heavily engineered brassiere, or sniffed ostentatiously at the lingering aroma of what Liverpudlians call finger pie. Part of every almost adolescent boy’s experience is to see small girls he has hitherto ignored or taken for granted suddenly grow into desirable young women. For John this happened spectacularly with Barbara Baker, whom he had known since they were toddlers together, seated on the floor at Mrs. Clark’s Sunday school. For years, he had regarded Barbara with the contempt that William Brown always showed to little girls, but at the age of fifteen, she suddenly metamorphosed into a curvaceous strawberry blonde who deliberately modeled her hair and clothes on cinema sex sirens—and even had the mystic initials BB. In Reynolds Park one day, she and a girlfriend found themselves being followed in a meaning way by John and Len Garry. On this occasion, it was Len who first made the running. “Len asked me to join him on a walk a few nights later, and I said ‘Yes,’” she remembers. “But I could see John watching me.”
She soon dropped Len and became John’s first “steady” girlfriend, as the sedate fifties phrase had it. In many ways, theirs was a relationship straight out of Enid Blyton: they would go for bike rides together or ice-skating at the Silver Blades rink in central Liverpool. Barbara got to know John’s mother and Aunt Mimi, and was often taken home to tea at Mendips, joining Michael Fishwick, and any aunts and cousins who were visiting, around the lavishly spread gateleg table. She remembers John as a romantic, naturally chivalrous boy, who bombarded her with love notes and drawings, was definitely not a Teddy Boy, and, thanks to Mimi’s hard verbal schooling, still did not speak with a Scouse accent.
As a rule, the courtship rituals went on without adult in
terference. A line was crossed one day, however, when a group including John, Barbara, and David Ashton went for a petting session into the field owned by St. Peter’s Church—i.e., virtually hallowed ground. Because John and Ashton were still members of the 3rd Allerton Scout Troop, both were summoned to explain their sacrilege before an official Scouts board of inquiry. “My Dad had been a scoutmaster, so the court was held at my house,” Ashton remembers. “As I was coming home beforehand, I met John. ‘Don’t you fuckin’ tell what you know,’ he said, and then hit me over the eye. I had a black eye for days afterwards.”
Len Garry shared John’s fondness for music—the “pop” aimed squarely at their parents’ generation—but for neither was it anything resembling a passion. As they cycled around, they would sing out loud, trying to outdo each other in the number of current hit songs they knew and in their skill as impersonators. “I was always better at ballads,” Len says. “But John was better at the uptempo stuff. A song he particularly liked was Mitchell Torok’s ‘Caribbean.’ I remember how, even when he was riding against the wind, standing up on his pedals, he always got the timing just right.”
They had little initial interest, therefore, in the Bill Haley phenomenon, which reached the first of several climaxes during that summer. Michigan-born Haley had been an obscure country-and-western singer until 1951, when he recorded a song called “Rock the Joint,” exchanging his usual cowboy yodel for the style and intonation of black rhythm and blues. America’s racial situation being what it was, the disk could be marketed only if no biographical details about Haley were given. His country music public would have been appalled by the idea of a white man singing a “negro tune,” while no black listener would have taken the performance seriously.
Three years later, by now fronting a group named the Comets, Haley recorded “Rock Around the Clock,” an exuberant piece of horological nonsense that was already a year old, with one unsuccessful version by black vocalist Sunny Dae on the market. Haley’s reinterpretation caused equally little stir until added to the soundtrack of The Blackboard Jungle, a film on the timely subject of delinquency in a New York high school. This change in context produced a devastating effect throughout America; wherever Haley’s voice rang out with “One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock RAHK…” the gritty drama on the screen was totally eclipsed by mayhem among the audience. Boys and girls alike went literally berserk, shrieking like banshees, tearing at the fabric of their seats, lurching out to dance in the aisles or engage in mass brawls that required dozens of police to contain them.
The separate terms rock and roll had always existed in black music as synonyms for rhythm-enhanced sex. Who exactly first joined them together to define the keening saxophone and hand-thwacked double-bass beat of Haley and his Comets can never be known for certain. The most likely contender was a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who billed his show on station WJW as The Moondog Rock ’n’ Roll Party.
Britain’s press, to begin with, treated rock ’n’ roll as merely another bizarre American novelty, like pie-eating contests, pole-squatting, or wedding ceremonies at the bottom of swimming pools. The mood changed as it became clear that Teddy Boys—and their scarcely less bizarre and repugnant Teddy Girls—were Haley’s most fanatical converts, and seemingly intent on destroying just as many cinemas as had their American cousins. Screenings of The Blackboard Jungle were canceled wholesale, “Rock Around the Clock” was banished both from radio and television, and dance halls banned the jitter-buggy dance that went with it. The result was as might have been expected. Haley’s record shot to number one in the Top 20 in May 1955, remaining on the chart for twenty-two weeks. The following October, it made number one again, and stayed on the chart a further seventeen weeks.
With hindsight, “Rock Around the Clock” looks like a kind of Phoney War—a warm-up for the cultural blitzkrieg soon to follow. Most of the excitement it generated was damped down by the sight of Bill Haley himself, a man already pushing thirty, with a cherubic smile and query-shaped kiss curl on his too-high forehead, who looked little different from the parents who so condemned him.
To capitalize on sales of the “Rock Around the Clock” recording, a film of the same name was rushed out, featuring Haley and the Comets with other emergent rock-’n’-roll celebrities like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, the Platters, and “Moondog” Alan Freed. John went to see it expecting a life-changing experience but came away disappointed. “I was very surprised.” he would recall. “Nobody was screaming and nobody was dancing in the aisles like I’d read. I was all set to tear up the seats, too, but nobody joined in.”
As if to prove the fad had done no serious harm, John’s school report for the 1955 summer term was considerably less of a disaster than usual. English: “He is capable of good work and has done quite well…a good knowledge of the books.” History: “He has tried hard and worked well.” Art: “Very satisfactory.” Handwork: “Satisfactory progress.” Physical training: “(height 5, 6 and a half, weight 9 st, 4 lbs [130 pounds]) F[airly] satisfactory.” Geography: “Undoubtedly trying harder.” General science: “An encouraging result. His work has been satisfactory but his behaviour in class is not always so.” The only wholly negative entries were for French (“disappointing” through fondness for “obtaining a cheap laugh in class”) and Religious Knowledge (“His work has been of a low standard”).
“The best report he has had for a long time,” noted a surprised Ernie Taylor in the space reserved for headmaster’s comment. “I hope this means that he has turned over a new leaf.”
THE GALLOTONE CHAMPION
Please God, give me a guitar.
He first heard about Elvis Presley from a Quarry Bank classmate named Don Beatty, one of the participants in the Great Dinner Tickets Swindle. Don had a copy of the New Musical Express—at that time rather a rarity in the far northwest—and pointed out a reference to America’s newest rock-’n’-roll sensation and his just-released new record, “Heartbreak Hotel.”
John reacted guardedly at first, remembering what a letdown Rock Around the Clock had been. “The music papers were saying Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra.
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ sounded a corny title, and his name seemed strange in those days. But then when I heard it, it was the end for me…I remember rushing home with the record and saying ‘He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray and Tennessee Ernie Ford.’”
When Presley erupted into popular music and mythology that spring of 1956, he was by no means the first entertainer to cause mass hysteria. During the 1920s, the silent screen idol Rudolf Valentino and the prototype crooner Rudy Vallee had each driven female audiences to frenzy—Vallee earning the nickname of “the guy with the cock in his voice,” Valentino attracting a screaming crowd of ten thousand even to his funeral. Two decades later, the young Frank Sinatra inspired a whole new species of female worshipper, the “bobbysoxer,” whose demented reactions at concerts ultimately competed in newsworthiness with the singer himself. Nor was such incontinence purely emotional: after Sinatra’s legendary opening at the New York Paramount Theater in 1947, it was found that many bobby-soxers, unable to contain themselves, had urinated where they sat.
All this was taken to uncharted new levels, however, by a twenty-one-year-old former truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, with dyed black hair and the face of a supercilious baby. For Presley did more than touch the trigger of feminine mass fantasy; he also gave release to the tension that had built up in young men with no more global conflict to burn off their testosterone. Here, rolled into one person, was a Valentino with a voice, a Sinatra with still greater power over young girls’ bladders, a James Dean in close-up more mesmeric than even Hollywood could contrive—in short, a rock-’n’-roll hero who looked every bit as gloriously disruptive as he sounded. The Phoney War of plaid jackets, soppy smiles, and kiss curls was over: all-out bombardment had finally begun.
For the vast majority of Britons, Pre
sley could not have been more incomprehensible if freshly beamed down from Mars. Bill Haley at least had a name that was recognizably human (one he happened to share with the current editor of The Times). But “Elvis Presley” was the strangest configuration of syllables yet to have crossed the Atlantic—more so than Joe DiMaggio, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., or even Liberace, which some newspapers felt obliged to render phonetically (“Lee-ber-arch-ee”). Commentators were also intrigued by the fact that Presley performed his gyrations while simultaneously playing—or appearing to play—a guitar slung around his neck. Americans were familiar with the guitar as a normal accessory for singers of both country and blues; in Britain it was perhaps the most anonymous of all musical instruments, glimpsed fleetingly in the back rows of dance bands or as shadowy silhouettes behind Spanish flamenco dancers.
When John first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” the whole edifice of rumor and ridicule that the media that created around Presley instantly melted away. All he needed to know was in the song’s opening fanfare—that anguished, echoey cry of “Well, since my baby left me…” answered by double stabs of high treble electric guitar. It was, in fact, not rock ’n’ roll or even a ballad, but a blues shout in a traditional pattern that Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson would instantly have recognized. But while blues songs deal with adult themes, “Heartbreak Hotel” reached directly to the primary adolescent emotion, melodramatic self-pity. For the first time, any spotty youth dumped by his girlfriend, for whatever good reason, could now aspire to this metaphorical refuge for “broken-hearted lovers,” “down at the end of Lonely Street.”
John Lennon: The Life Page 9