Far from the mindless nonsense Presley’s critics accused him of peddling, the lyrics were neat and skillful enough to be dissected in a Quarry Bank literature test, the hotel metaphor sustained by a bellhop whose “tears keep flowing” and a “desk clerk dressed in black.” The arrangement had the visceral simplicity of blues played live in the wee, small hours, switching between foot-stomping bass, jangly whorehouse piano, and jagged guitar half-chords suggesting the bottleneck style of Delta bluesmen. Those riffs are still potent today after ten thousand hearings; to an adolescent in 1956 who’d never heard a guitar played as an offensive weapon, they were stupefying. No sound ever had been, or ever would be, more perfectly tuned to hormones going berserk.
That May, a second Presley single, “Blue Suede Shoes,” joined “Heartbreak Hotel” in the UK Top 20; in August came a third, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” and in September a fourth, “Hound Dog.” Each drew John still further into this intoxicating new world where guitars rang like carillons of victory bells, pianos pounded like jackhammers, and drums spat like machine guns. Each announced more joyously than the last that life need not be the gray, humdrum vista he and his fellow war babies had always known. As he himself put it: “Rock ’n’ roll was real. Everything else was unreal.”
Film clips of Presley’s American TV appearances now also began to filter through, revealing him to be almost ludicrously good-looking, albeit in a baleful, smoldering style more usually associated with female glamour icons. Here, indeed, was history’s one and only male pinup for straight males. In common with his other British converts, John obsessively read and reread every newspaper story about Presley, cut out and saved every magazine picture of him, pored over every detail of his hair, clothes, and sublimely sullen face for what it might reveal of his private character and lifestyle. At Mendips he chattered so endlessly about his new hero that an exasperated Mimi finally brought down the guillotine. “It was nothing but Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,” she recalled. “In the end I said ‘Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.’”
Like thousands of other boys who had never previously cared a button for their wardrobe or grooming, he began to model his hair, his dress, his whole being, on Presley’s. Like many Quarry Bank boys, he did what he could to Elvis-ize his school uniform, fastening only the bottom of his three blazer buttons to create a drape effect and stretching his gold-and-black school tie into the nearest possible semblance of a Slim Jim. The great problem was the trousers, which men and boys alike still wore in the baggy cut that had prevailed since the 1920s. Scarcely any men’s outfitters yet stocked ready-made “drainpipes,” so one’s only recourse was to take a conventional pair to an alterations tailor, sartorial equivalent of the back-street abortionist, and have their cuffs tapered from twenty-four to sixteen or (in cases of ultimate daring) fourteen inches.
No fiercer controversy raged in British families of the mid-1950s than this. No matter that the British Empire had been largely built by men in narrow trousers, nor that every palace, stately home, and museum in the land thronged with portraits of narrow-trousered kings, dukes, prime ministers, and generals. The style was now identified with lawless, low-class Teddy Boys and, by the more knowing, with homosexuals—although, paradoxically, it was deemed quite respectable in fawn cavalry twill, if worn by off-duty Guards officers together with riding jackets and tweed caps.
At Mendips, Mimi was predictably horrified and outraged by her nephew’s attempted metamorphosis into a “common” Teddy Boy. She might be unable to stop John ruining the hang of his tailor-made blazer and leaving his top shirt button permanently agape above his mutilated school tie. She might not have prevented Signor Bioletti at Penny Lane from restyling his nice, wavy hair, as she put it, “like an overgrown lavatory brush.” But with trousers she dug her heels in: John was absolutely forbidden either to buy “drainies” or have any of his existing pairs tapered. His response was to smuggle some to a compliant tailor and wear the finished product only outside Mimi’s field of vision. He would deposit them at Nigel Walley’s or Pete Shotton’s and change into them there, or leave Mendips wearing them underneath an ordinary pair of trousers, peeling off this outer layer once safely out of Mimi’s sight.
One grown-up, at least, could be relied on not to shudder at rock ’n’ roll or pour scorn on its lip-curling godhead. John’s mother Julia adored Presley’s records, thought he was dishy to look at, and relished all the ways he was upsetting the generation whose values had always so oppressed her. It was Julia who, daring Mimi’s wrath, bought John his first real rock-’n’-roll clothes—a colored (as opposed to plain gray or white) shirt, a pair of black drainpipe jeans, a “shortie” raincoat with padded shoulders. When a kitten was given to John’s two small half sisters, Julia and Jackie, their mother named it Elvis.
With every passing week of 1956, the heavenly noises from across the Atlantic multiplied and diversified. From New Orleans came Antoine “Fats” Domino, a singer-pianist with the body of a whale and the face of a kindly Burmese cat, who had already been around and playing much this same stuff since 1949. From St. Louis came Charles “Chuck” Berry, a loose-limbed youth with a lounge-lizard mustache, who not only wrote and performed his witty anthems in the former Whites Only realm of expensive cars and high schools, but also simultaneously played cherry-red lead guitar, jackknifing his skinny knees or loping across the stage in profile like a duck. From Macon, Georgia, came a former dishwasher named Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a shock-haired imp endowed with the dual gift of being able to roar like an erupting volcano and ululate like an entire Bedouin tribe in mourning.
If black rock-’n’-rollers, like Presley himself, teetered on the edge of comedy, Richard’s exultant gibberish (“Tutti-frutti O-rooty…Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom!”) was a deep-South descendant of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” “The most exciting thing…was when he screamed just before the solo,” John later recalled. “It used to make your hair stand on end. When I heard it, it was so great, I couldn’t speak. You know how it is when you are torn. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life…I didn’t want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, even in my mind.”
As with almost every other new American idea, gauche and unconvincing British replicas quickly followed. In the wake of Presley’s onslaught, a young Londoner named Larry Parnes launched the United Kingdom’s first native rock-’n’-roller—a cockney merchant seaman named Tommy Hicks, now renamed Tommy Steele. Provided with the requisite exploding hair and Presley-style guitar, Steele drew crowds of screaming girls wherever he appeared and had several Top 10 hits. But his whole marketing exemplified the notion of rock ’n’ roll as a passing fad or soon-to-be-unmasked confidence trick. One of Larry Parnes’s first acts was to move him into cabaret by booking him into London’s Café de Paris in the footsteps of Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward. In little more than a year, his career as a teenage idol would be metaphorically wound up by a film entitled The Tommy Steele Story.
Even Steele’s patent harmlessness could not mitigate adult Britain’s hatred and terror of rock ’n’ roll and the resolve to stamp it out, if not by frontal attack and ridicule, then by attrition. The BBC carried no news items about even its most famous performers and mentioned its very name only with lip-curled distaste. Apart from records, its main public outlets were jukeboxes in the newfangled espresso coffee bars, which explained why such places were always packed with teenagers and also why adults viewed them rather like speakeasies in Prohibition America. At traveling fairs, rock ’n’ roll would blare out over carousels and bumper cars, so strengthening its perceived links with the grubby, the dishonest, and the violent.
The steadiest source of supply was Radio Luxembourg, out in mysterious mainland Europe, which operated a daily English-language music service playing all the latest rock-’n’-roll hits with American-style disc jockeys, advertisements, an
d station IDs. But Luxembourg did not come on the air until 8:00 p.m., and reception on British wirelesses was always erratic. Like all teenagers up and down the land, John listened in late at night with a portable radio at low volume under the bedclothes so that Mimi would not hear it.
With rock fizzing in his veins around the clock, even things he had once regarded as treats now seemed irksomely unreal. During the school summer holidays of 1956, he paid his usual long visit to his Aunt Mater, Uncle Bert, and cousin Stanley in Edinburgh, accompanied by Aunt Nanny, her nine-year-old son, Michael, and Harrie’s nine-year-old son, David. (Husbands seldom featured in these inter-sister excursions.) Part of the time was spent at Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, Sutherland, near Cape Wrath, the furthermost northwesterly tip of Scotland. This was a working farm, set in vast, unspoiled tracts of sheep-dotted moorland and peat bogs. The family party roughed it in a primitive farmhouse, lit by oil lamps and candles, and noisy with the screeches of Mater’s pet parrot, Harry Parry.
As well as running the croft, Uncle Bert was carrying out extensive improvements, and John and young Michael and David found themselves allotted a punishing schedule of heavy manual work. “We were scything hay, building dry stone walls, carting wheelbarrow-loads of sand,” Michael Cadwallader remembers. “John soon got fed up with that, and wasn’t thrilled by the company of two nine-year-old boys. He obviously couldn’t wait to leave.”
Rock ’n’ roll had no fiercer enemy in Britain than followers of traditional jazz, who either did not know or preferred to forget that the two were actually first cousins. Jazz had always overlapped with blues and country, the twin streams that produced Elvis Presley. The more enlightened traditional jazz bandleaders, like Humphrey Lyttelton, acknowledged this by incorporating both into their repertoire, even occasionally bringing over American bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy to make guest appearances at their concerts. However, in music, as everywhere else, the British class system held firm. Rock-’n’-rollers were firmly bracketed at the most unsavory end of the lower working class, while jazzers were middle-class student types who wore striped college scarves and drank half pints of cider.
The most archivally minded trad bandleader of pre-rock-’n’-roll times was the trombonist Chris Barber. Since well before Presley hit Britain, Barber’s shows had featured his foxy-faced banjo player, Tony, aka “Lonnie,” Donegan, on guitar with a small rhythm section, performing in an otherwise forgotten American folk style known as skiffle. The word (like jazz itself) was onomatopoeic, harking back to the bleak Depression era of the thirties, when poor whites, unable to afford conventional instruments, would beat out a shuffly rhythm on makeshift ones like kitchen washboards, empty boxes, and trashcan lids.
In January 1956, Donegan and a three-strong skiffle group scored a surprise hit with “Rock Island Line,” a train song associated with the thirties’ blues giant Huddie (“Leadbelly”) Ledbetter. Undoubtedly helped by the word rock in its title (though the reference was purely geological) it reached number eight in Britain, was accepted for U.S. release on the London label, and by April stood at tenth place in the American charts. For any British-made record to catch on in America was rare enough; for one to do so by reinterpreting such a uniquely American idiom was unprecedented.
British skiffle was essentially boys’ music, a gift out of the blue to boys like John who had been just too young for rock ’n’ roll’s first uprising and felt excluded from the tough Teddy Boy culture that now monopolized it. Skiffle was rock ’n’ roll in a milder, more socially acceptable form, also intoxicatingly American but without the taint of sexuality or violence. In its Anglicized version, it drew on every ethnic source—blues, country, folk, and jazz—though its young British performers seldom knew one genre from another, let alone understood what social conditions had inspired the songs or what pain or anger or sense of social injustice had gone into their creation. All that mattered was the frantic, pattering beat and those magic references to railroads, penitentiaries, and chain gangs.
Elvis Presley had made the guitar an unreachable symbol of glamour and sexual allure to young British males; now Lonnie Donegan made it a reachable one. For skiffle followed the traditional twelve-bar blues pattern of four chords, in their simplest versions requiring only one or two fingers. Anyone could play them, pretty much instantaneously.
Skiffle became the British pop sensation of 1956–57, relegating even Presley and rock ’n’ roll to the sidelines. Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group began a run of Top 10 hits that would not be surpassed until the next decade, with genuine or ersatz folk titles such as “Lost John,” “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie,” “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O,” and “Cumberland Gap.” Record companies began a frantic hunt for alternative skiffle stars, concentrating their efforts on London’s Soho district, specifically the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, where Tommy Steele had made some early live appearances. A fledgling record producer, the Parlophone label’s George Martin, advanced his career just a little by finding his way to the 2 I’s and signing up a skiffle quintet named the Vipers.
Most important, skiffle electrified ordinary youths, far away from London, who had never considered themselves musical and once would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up and sing in public. All over the country, youthful skiffle groups were formed with names hopefully evoking the great American open road—the Ramblers, the Nomads, the Streamliners, the Cottonpickers. Kitchens were stripped of washboards and brooms; guitars that had gathered dust for years in music-shop windows disappeared overnight. In an echo of not-so-distant Austerity years, the newspapers were soon reporting a national guitar shortage.
A few would-be boy skifflers did not start as absolute beginners, thanks to fathers, older brothers, or uncles who were pro or semipro musicians. But only a very few can have owed their head start to their mothers, as John did. For Julia could play the banjo, an instrument even more unexpectedly catapulted into fashion than the guitar. Well before skiffle arrived, she had begun teaching John to pick out single-string versions of “Little White Lies” or “Girl of My Dreams” on the sound principle that if he could play an instrument, he’d always be popular. But now the banjo was forgotten. “I used to read the ads for guitars,” he would recall, “and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted: ‘Please God, give me a guitar.’”
His Aunt Mimi has gone down in history as the person who bought John his first guitar, launching him on his roundabout path to immortality. Many times would she later recount how, weary of his endless pleas and nagging, she took him by bus down into central Liverpool and paid out £17 she could ill afford at Hessy’s music store in Whitechapel. Mimi certainly did buy John a guitar, and at some financial sacrifice, but that was a step or two further along the path. The first one he owned, and used until long after his skills had outgrown it, was given to him by Julia.
Whether that was the first guitar he played is another matter. John himself was to recall initially borrowing one from another boy and experimenting rather inconclusively with it before he got his own. This may well have been in the interval between being promised his heart’s desire by his mother and actually holding the wondrous object in his hands. After several weeks’ unsuccessful search around Liverpool, Julia finally obtained one by mail order on the installment plan. No record of the vendor has survived; the likeliest one seems to have been a mail-order firm named Headquarters and General Supplies of Coldharbour Lane, London SE5. At around the moment John got lucky, H & G announced their acquisition of “1,000 only” Gallotone Champion guitars, a mass-produced make imported from South Africa. The cost was £10 19s 6d (£10.95) each, or 10 shillings (50p) deposit and eighteen two-weekly payments of 18s 11d (90p). The guitar was an acoustic Spanish flamenco-style model but with steel rather than gut strings, strummed not with the fingers but with a tortoiseshell plectrum. Inside the sound hole was a label saying GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT.
He was not the only Quarry Bank pupil able to f
launt such a status symbol in that autumn term of 1956. A fellow member of Woolton house, a studious, scientifically minded boy named Eric Griffiths, had also got hold of a Spanish-style guitar similar to John’s in size, shape, and cheapness. Although the two boys had never been especially friendly, they agreed to go for guitar lessons together with a tutor in Hunts Cross. However, the tutor wanted them to learn to read music, which neither could be bothered to do. The easy shortcut suggested by Julia was that she should tune their six-string guitars like a four-string banjo—that is, using only the guitar’s four thinnest treble strings and ignoring the two thick bass ones. Then she herself could teach them all the chords they needed for the music they wanted to play.
From here on, there was no stopping John. Whenever Pete Shotton or Nigel Walley visited Mendips, they would find him seated on the end of his bed, struggling to stretch his left hand into a C or G chord shape, pressing down hard and rippling the pick again and again until the sound rang clear and true, oblivious of the painful grooves that the steel strings cut into his fingertips. “He’d sit there strumming,” Nigel remembers, “singing any words that came into his head. In a couple of minutes, he’d have a tune going.”
Mimi tried to protest about the neglect of his schoolwork, especially with GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams now only a few months away, but to no avail; as Liverpudlians say, never more aptly than here, he was “lost.” From the kitchen or living room, Mimi would shout an admonition destined to be given back to her one day, chidingly, engraved on a mock-ceremonial plaque: “The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.”
John Lennon: The Life Page 10