John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  According to Eric Griffiths, neither John nor he had thought of starting their own skiffle group until another Quarry Bank boy, George Lee, suggested it one day during break. Alas for the donor of this stupendously bright idea, he himself was not to join or have anything whatsoever to do with the group that resulted. More than a year was to pass before its personnel included anyone named George.

  John, as usual, refused to consider any enterprise that did not include his fellow Outlaw Pete Shotton. This being skiffle, Pete’s lack of even the smallest particle of musical talent was not an issue. He took on the role of washboard player, for which the sole qualification was possession of a washboard—not as straightforward as it might appear, since skifflemania had also created a national washboard shortage. The group was initially called the Blackjacks, but within about a week Pete Shotton suggested something more in tune with the skiffling ethos of hoboes and chain gangs. Quarry Bank’s school song had a line in which the pupils apostrophized themselves as “Quarry men, old before our birth…” Quarries were where chain gangs worked, and John and Pete indubitably regarded themselves as convicts at hard labor. So their skiffle group became the Quarrymen.

  Two more recruits quickly emerged from their immediate circle of friends in Woolton house. (George Lee belonged to a rival house, Aigburth, which may perhaps account for his exclusion.) One was the studious Rod Davis, playing the banjo his parents had recently bought him on a trip to Wales. The other was a boy known to John—and featured in his cartoon gallery—as Bill “Smell Type” Smith, plunking the one-string skiffle “bass” composed of a broomstick and an empty tea chest. To make the tea chest less starkly utilitarian, Rod’s mother covered it in brown wallpaper, on which musical notes and a large treble clef were then outlined in white.

  Most skiffle groups featured no percussion other than strummed guitars and the rattle of the washboard player’s thimble-capped fingers. If drummers did feature in the lineup, they tended to play only a single snare drum on a stand. The Quarrymen, however, started out with the luxury of a drummer in possession of his own complete kit (something that would seldom come along quite so easily again). He was not a Quarry Bank pupil but an acquaintance of Rod and Eric named Colin Hanton, who had already left school to become an apprentice upholsterer at the Guy Rogers furniture factory in Speke. At eighteen, he was two years older than the others, though his diminutive build and innocent face made him look younger—so much so that he had to carry his birth certificate around with him to prove to pub landlords that he was of the legal drinking age.

  Strictly speaking, he was not quite in the other Quarrymens’ social bracket; nor had he any performing experience beyond playing along with jazz records at home; nor was he nearly as much interested in percussion as he was in downing pints of black velvet (Guinness stout mixed with cider) at every possible opportunity. Such considerations were easily waived in view of the almost brand-new drums that came with him. And, working man or not, he seemed happy enough to throw in his lot with a gaggle of schoolboys, even getting a printer friend to stencil QUARRY MEN (splitting the name for space reasons) on the side of his bass drum.

  From the beginning, as Hanton remembers, John naturally took on the role of leader. “He was the only singer in the group, so he was the one who said what we played and in what order. And, if we wanted to sound any good, we had to learn to play the songs he knew.”

  Prophetically, there was soon upheaval in the Quarrymen’s lineup. Although Bill Smith had seemed keen enough to play tea-chest bass, he proved so bad about turning up for rehearsals that the others unanimously voted him out. A resentful Smell-Type retaliated by holding the tea chest hostage at his house: when all requests for its return were ignored, John led a night expedition to retrieve it from the Smiths’ garage. After this, the role of bass player was divided between Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan, and Ivan’s Liverpool Institute friend, Len Garry.

  The Quarrymen’s repertoire at first consisted mainly of Lonnie Donegan songs: “Cumberland Gap,” “Lost John,” “Gamblin’ Man,” “Wabash Cannonball.” As well as “Rock Island Line,” Leadbelly’s blues oeuvre supplied another couple of easily accessible four-chorders, the upbeat “Cotton Fields” and the doleful “Midnight Special.” Rod Davis, a passionate folk-music fan, introduced Burl Ives numbers like “Worried Man Blues,” while John would do the occasional country number, like Hank Williams’s “Honky Tonk Blues.” He had, in fact, been a fan of Williams—the prototype singer-songwriter—well before Presley came along, and been conscious of the strong country-music following among Merseyside’s Irish population since he was a small boy. The first guitar he ever remembered seeing had been played “by a guy in a cowboy suit…with stars and a cowboy hat and a big Dobro [self-amplifying metal guitar]…There had been cowboys before there was rock ’n’ roll.”

  The folk input even included a few traditional British ballads, most notably “Maggie May,” the requiem for an archetypal Liverpool “tottie,” or tart, from the well-worn hookers’ beat between Lime Street and Canning Place. John had always vaguely known the words, and was given a refresher course by his mother, playing his guitar in the living room at Mendips, watched also by Mimi and her regular boarder, Michael Fishwick. Julia knew the whole bawdy lyric that most skifflers dared not sing, and she articulated every word (“No more she’ll rob the sailor, or be fucked by many a whaler…”) with Vera Lynn clarity and sweetness. Fortunately, most of it went completely over her straitlaced sister’s head.

  Otherwise, in these days when tape recorders were rare and fabulously expensive, learning the words of a song could be a laborious business. Every pop record that was released was still also published as sheet music with a one-color cover picture of the vocalist, the words spelled out in the style of operatic libretti (“You ai-n’t nu-thin’ but a ho-und dog…”) and anachronistic directions such as “Allegro” or “bright, lively rhythm.” But for a schoolboy like John, buying the record itself at six shillings per copy was costly enough. The only way to learn it was to play it over and over again, each time scribbling down another phrase, or part of one, and gaining another clue as to which chord changed into which. Since Mimi refused to have a record player at Mendips, John had to take his records to Julia’s and learn them from hers.

  As always if he really wanted to do something, he never gave up. When he finally sold his copy of “Rock Island Line” to Rod Davis, he’d thrown it back onto the gramophone so many times and so roughly that the hole in its center had been worn out of shape by the turntable stem. The first time Rod tried to play it, it wobbled so crazily that the song was barely recognizable.

  The Quarrymen’s first gig was at St. Barnabas Church Hall—popularly known as “Barney’s,” close to the Penny Lane roundabout where John used to get off the bus for Dovedale Primary. No advertisements appeared in the local press, so we can only roughly date his debut in front of a live audience as September or October of 1956. Nothing else is known of the event except that his mother turned up loyally to cheer him on, accompanied by his steady girlfriend, Barbara Baker.

  The next significant booking was an anomalously upmarket one at the Lee Park Golf Club in Gateacre. Lee Park was that common fifties institution, a “Jewish-only” club, catering to those whose religion excluded them from playing on other courses in the area. Nigel Walley had recently begun working there as an apprentice golf pro, and he talked the secretary into booking the Quarrymen as an extra attraction at a Saturday-night club dance. They played in the round, while a formally dressed and largely adult crowd sat and watched. There was no fee, but a cold supper was provided and a collection taken for them afterwards.

  From the very first, John dominated the stage as if born to it, pounding his cheap little mail-order guitar, singing in the high, slightly acid voice that, unusually, he made no attempt to Americanize. To be heard above five frantically skiffling companions, usually without a microphone, the only option was all-out attack. On such public show, it was more unthinkable than e
ver for him to wear his hated glasses, even though without them he could barely see the edge of the stage. As a result, he adopted a slightly hunched, splay-legged stance, his face thrust forward and eyes narrowed to slits in a way that onlookers took to be aggressive and challenging but often was no more than effort to get his surroundings in focus. Though he never indulged in overt displays of egotism, his companions were left in no doubt as who was boss. “John used to go at his guitar so hard that he’d often break a string,” Rod Davis remembers. “When that happened, he’d hand his guitar to me, take my banjo and carry on playing while I changed the guitar-string for him.”

  Perform it though he did with his whole heart and soul, skiffle was never enough for John. What he really wanted to be playing was rock ’n’ roll, not the historically meaningful tracts and protests of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie but the magic, molten gibberish of Elvis Presley and Little Richard. And time was pressing. Every day brought a fresh hail of adult calumnies against rock ’n’ rollers and seemingly authoritative predictions that they would all soon have passed into richly deserved extinction. As evidence, the finger was pointed at Presley himself and how he already seemed to be hedging his bets by recording fewer rock-’n’-roll rabble-rousers and more ballads. December 1956 found “the King” starring in his first Hollywood movie, Love Me Tender, and topping the charts with a theme song that was less ballad than hymn.

  So John, at the very earliest stage, began mixing rock ’n’ roll into the Quarrymen’s skiffle repertoire in small, surreptitious doses, like nips of vodka added to orange juice. He was, anyway, in the habit of making up his own words to current hit songs when he hadn’t been able to decipher their real ones. So he’d play rock-’n’-roll songs as skiffle, slipping in a folksy reference here and there to mollify the purists. The example always cited by his former companions was “Come Go with Me,” a 1957 million seller for the Del-Vikings in the doo-wop, or part-singing, style created by a cappella vocal groups on urban street corners. John’s Quarrymen version—perhaps the seeds of a future song lyric’s invitation to “let me take you down”—ran:

  Come come come come

  and go with me

  down down down down to

  the Penitentiary

  One immediate effect of his new passion was a slight improvement of his profile at Quarry Bank High School. In October 1956, the remote and humorless Ernie Taylor had retired from the headmastership and been replaced by William Ernest Pobjoy, at only thirty-five one of the youngest school principals in the northwest. Mr. Pobjoy had been warned in advance about the malign influence of Shennon and Lotton, by now sometimes too extreme even to feature in the official punishment log. “I was told there was a certain member of staff that Lennon had actually thumped,” the former head remembers now. “The poor man was so humiliated that he’d begged for the matter not to be reported.”

  Despite his youth and far lighter touch, “Popeye” Pobjoy was no pushover. Soon after his arrival, he found it necessary to give John three strokes with the cane—an experience that helped convince him to phase out corporal punishment from the school altogether. Early in 1957, while Popeye was temporarily absent, Shennon and Lotton were each suspended for a week by the deputy head, Ian Gallaway.

  But in general John’s guitar made him more a member of the school community than he’d ever wished or expected to be. Now when he went to the headmaster’s study, it might not necessarily be for the cane but to ask in all politeness if the Quarrymen could play at the next sixth-form dance. In a turret of the old Gothic schoolhouse was a little-used classroom where—with Popeye’s tacit permission—John, Pete, and Eric Griffiths would hold practice sessions during break or at the end of afternoon school.

  Rehearsal space for the whole eight-man group (if you count all three alternating bass players) was less easy to find. At Mendips, John’s bedroom was too small, and Mimi’s house-proud eye too vigilant, for them ever to feel quite comfortable there. They might convene at Eric’s or Colin’s house or, if the weather were fine, in the back garden of Rod Davis’s. Next door lived the grandparents of the future Olympic runner Paula Radcliffe; as John tried out the latest Donegan or Presley number, the Radcliffes would jokily throw pennies to him over the garden fence.

  But most times the Quarrymen would pick up a packet of Wild Woodbines and a newspaper parcel of fish and chips, and go over to their unofficial den mother’s house in Blomfield Road. However many they were, they could depend on the same warm welcome from Julia; she would make them endless cups of tea, share their ciggies, be a sounding board for their latest numbers and a sympathetic listener to their latest adventures and misadventures. The practice session itself would usually be held in the bathroom, whose uncarpeted floor and tiled surfaces maximized the volume and echo of acoustic skiffle instruments; to get the very best effect, John, Eric, and Rod would stand together in the bath. No matter if Julia happened to be bathing John’s two half sisters when the musicians arrived: the little girls would be evicted, the water would be drained, and the two guitarists and banjo player would take off their shoes and clamber into the vacated tub.

  Only skiffle groups composed of affluent working men could afford their own private transport. Rod Davis’s father had an Austin Hereford car in which he’d occasionally chauffeur the Quarrymen to their gigs. Most of the time they had to travel on Liverpool Corporation’s ever-plentiful and reliable green double-decker buses, somehow packing the tea chest and Colin Hanton’s drums into the luggage compartment under the stairs. On these journeys a weather eye always had to be kept open for two local heavies named Rod and Willo, who, for unexplained reasons, had vowed to get them, and of whom even John made no secret of being terrified. One night when the Quarrymen got off their bus in Woolton village, Rod and Willo were waiting in ambush. The skifflers all managed to escape, but at the cost of abandoning their tea-chest bass, which stayed in the road where they dropped it for several days afterwards, being sideswiped this way and that by passing traffic.

  After John, the group’s most extrovert member—and the only other one with any noticeable singing ability—was Len Garry. By far the best of their three original alternating bass players, Len soon took over the role from Ivan Vaughan and Nigel Walley. Bookish Ivan returned to his school studies with some relief, while “Walloggs” became the group’s manager. He approached the role with great seriousness, writing earnest letters in longhand to local dance promoters and persuading even the Woolton newsagents who had suffered most from John’s shoplifting to display advertisements for the Quarrymen free of charge in their front windows. He also gave out business cards, expressed with old-fashioned formality and claiming an impressive command of musical styles:

  Country—Western—Rock ’n’ roll—Skiffle

  THE QUARRY MEN [sic]

  Open for engagements

  Their fee varied between £3 and £5, according to length of performance, divided among six of them, since their manager also took an equal share.

  John’s insistence on putting rock ’n’ roll first onstage, if not in print, was to cause Nigel many headaches with promoters of skiffle-only venues, as well as some little embarrassment in his day job as an apprentice golf pro. In the Lee Park clubhouse, he had become friendly with a doctor named Sytner, whose son, Alan, was about to open a jazz club in central Liverpool. Its premises were the cellar of an old warehouse in Mathew Street, and—in a conscious echo of jazz joints on the Parisian Left Bank—it was to be named the Cavern. Alan Sytner agreed to book the Quarrymen (advertising them as “Quarry Men”) for a skiffle session in company with other local groups, including the Deltones, the Dark Town Skiffle Group, and the Demon Five.

  But the Cavern in this first incarnation proved hostile territory, peopled by traditional jazz fans of the most earnest and intolerant kind. Skiffle they could tolerate, for its blues and folk ancestry, but rock ’n’ roll had much the same effect on them as a string of garlic on a vampire. John nonetheless launched into his Presley and Fats Domi
no numbers, oblivious of the nauseated silence that greeted each one. “I tried to argue with him,” Rod Davis remembers, “not because I was a purist myself, but because it was so obviously a suicidal thing to do with that particular audience.” John carried on regardless, so “lost” that when a note was passed up to him, he took it to be a song request. But it was from the Cavern’s management, and contained a single terse instruction: “Cut out the bloody rock.”

  Just as it had for his father, Alf, two decades earlier, the Empire Theatre in Lime Street represented John’s ultimate ambition as a performer. True to its time-honored place on the music-hall Number One Circuit, the Empire now presented all the country’s top skiffle and rock-’n’-roll stars, usually at the head of a traditional variety bill whose jugglers and comedians had to struggle to make themselves heard over anticipatory teenage screams.

  Alf Lennon had never gotten further than backstage at the Empire. But his son received an early chance to tread its hallowed boards when a Carroll Levis Discoveries show came through town in June 1957. Levis was an oleaginous Canadian, known in glamour-hungry and credulous postwar Britain as “Mister Star-maker.” During the fifties, he used to tour provincial theaters, holding talent contests for every kind of would-be entertainer, from singers and comedians to parakeet trainers and players of musical saws.

  When the Quarrymen turned up at the Empire for the contest’s Sunday heats (minus Rod Davis, whose religious parents would not let him take part), they found several other skiffle groups also hungry to be discovered by Mister Star-maker. Their main competition, they decided, was a group from Speke, the Sunnysiders, who included a midget named Nicky Cuff on tea-chest bass. The Sunnysiders’ act was partly comic, with Cuff (in everyday life, a workmate of Colin Hanton’s) running onstage dressed in a top hat and tails and explaining that he’d lost his way to the Adelphi Hotel. His other gimmick was being able to stand on his tea chest while belaboring its single string.