John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  On every hand, deities that once had flashed and thundered invulnerably from the heavens now seemed to be plummeting to earth. During a 1957 Australian tour, Little Richard had seen Russia’s Sputnik space satellite flash through the night sky and interpreted it as a personal summons to him from God. Symbolically throwing a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbor, he had given up singing “Good Golly Miss Molly” and begun training for the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been hounded out of Britain when it emerged that he was bigamously married to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra Gayle. Chuck Berry had been arrested on immorality charges connected with a teenage waitress, for which he would eventually receive two years imprisonment.

  Across the Atlantic, however, rock was suffering no such vertiginous decline. Performers like Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and the Everly Brothers, who had become yesterday’s men in their homeland, continued to release records and play concerts in Britain—and across Europe—and be welcomed there as rapturously as ever. Britain also by now had its own fledgling rock-’n’-roll scene, which gained in strength and confidence as its American exemplar lost heart.

  One British city, above all, devotedly kept the rock-’n’-roll flame alive. In Liverpool, dozens of scrubby skiffle groups of yesteryear had metamorphosed into rock combos whose names combined unalloyed Yank-worship with native humor and wordplay: Karl Terry and the Cruisers, Derry and the Seniors (a play on America’s Danny and the Juniors), Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Silhouettes, the Four Jays, the Bluegenes. Several of the groups were far more than mere Buddy Holly copyists, featuring pianos and saxes like the “rockin’ bands” behind Little Richard and Larry (“Bony Moronie”) Williams.

  At the bottom of the heap, so far down that few people even knew they existed, were John Lennon and the Quarrymen. Indeed, despite all the shaping-up that had gone on since Paul’s arrival, there was serious doubt if they would last very far into 1959. January 1 found them back onstage at Wilson Hall, playing for the overdue Christmas party of the Garston bus depot’s social club. The booking had came through George Harrison’s bus-driver father, who in his spare time acted as the club’s entertainments secretary and compere. Harry Harrison had also persuaded the manager of a nearby cinema, The Pavilion, to drop by and catch their act with a view to giving them further work in the future.

  “To start with, everything went really well,” drummer Colin Hanton remembers. “We were even given our own dressing-room to rehearse and tune up in. The act went over great—all the bus-drivers and clippies [conductors] really dug us. When they tried to draw the stage curtains after our first set, something went wrong with the mechanism, and the curtains wouldn’t pull. John made a joke about it to the audience, which got a big laugh, and we played an extra number while the problem was sorted out. When we came offstage, feeling really pleased with ourselves, we were told ‘There’s a pint for each of you lads at the bar.’ We ended up having more than just a pint, so for our second set we were pissed out of our minds, all except George—and we were terrible.”

  The aftereffects of beer and failure inevitably led to a row on the bus journey home. As an older workingman, Colin had no taste for sick humor and took exception when Paul began joking around in John’s “spastic talk”—“thik ik unk,” and so on. After a heated exchange, he jumped up, rang the bell one stop too early, piled his drums off the bus, and never showed up for another performance.

  John was thus left alone with his two schoolboy sidemen Paul and George—a matchless combination one of these days but back in British rock-’n’-roll’s Ice Age an unmitigated catastrophe. For without a drummer, however indifferent, three acoustic guitarists, however resourceful, could not hope to be taken seriously as a live group. Without the underpinning beat of bass pedal, snare, and tom-tom, their songs did not qualify as rock, merely a form of jumped-up skiffle or folk that in the average riotous Liverpool hall would have to fight even to be heard. They put a brave face on it, and approached several promoters for work as a nonpercussive trio, but from each one came the same brusque query: “What about your rhythm?” John’s hopefully reassuring reply of “The rhythm’s in the guitars” was the cue for slammed doors all over town.

  One that remained slightly ajar led to a place he had previously thought an impregnable bastion of anti-rock-’n’-roll prejudice. Stu Sutcliffe and Bill Harry both sat on the entertainments committee of the art college’s union society, the students’ social body, and managed to talk down the trad jazz zealots sufficiently to get the Quarrymen occasional bookings for college dances. At Stu’s and Bill’s prompting, the committee also voted funds to buy an amplifier, officially for the use of all visiting entertainers but in practice so that John, Paul, and George could give the rhythm in their guitars some extra bite.

  The college provided only occasional gigs, for negligible payment, and John, at least, took them with not much more seriousness than public rehearsals. One day, Helen Anderson had to give him a bright yellow cable-stitch sweater she was wearing when he hadn’t bothered to put together a stage outfit for that evening’s show. In exchange, he gave her his Quarry Bank exercise book, with its carefully indexed cartoons of “Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon,” “Smell-type Smith,” and the rest.

  Times became so slow for the Quarrymen that George Harrison took to sitting in with other small-scale groups, in particular one called the Les Stewart Quartet, who appeared regularly at the Lowlands coffee bar. George’s defection looked to become permanent when the Stewart Quartet were offered a residency at a club named the Casbah, which was about to open in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby. It belonged to an attractive, dark-eyed woman named Mona Best, whose husband, Johnny, had for many years been Liverpool’s main boxing promoter. At the outset it was not intended as a serious business venture, simply a meeting place for Mrs. Best’s sons Rory and Peter and their friends in the basement of their rambling Victorian home in Hayman’s Green. But on the eve of opening night, August 28, the quartet broke up in acrimony, and Mrs. Best asked George if he knew any musicians who could take their place. He volunteered himself, John, and Paul.

  The Casbah’s opening saw John graduate at last from the vermilion Gallotone Champion guitar (“Guaranteed not to split”) that his mother had bought two years previously. In August, he persuaded Mimi to stake him to a Hofner Club 40 semisolid model (i.e., playable both acoustically and electrically) with a fawn-colored cutaway body, a black scratchplate and an impressive cluster of tone-and volume-control knobs. The trip they made to collect it from Hessy’s in Whitechapel would be enshrined in Mimi’s memory as buying him his first guitar for the—to her—hefty sum of £17. In fact, that was merely a down payment: the Club 40’s retail price was £28 7s, which installment-plan charges (supposedly to be met by John) increased to £30 9s.

  John, Paul, and George played at the Casbah for seven successive Saturday nights, still billed as the Quarrymen and augmented by a fourth guitarist named Ken Brown, a member of the disbanded Les Stewart Quartet. The club proved an instant hit, attracting such crowds that Mrs. Best had to hire a doorman to back up her own formidable presence behind the snack and soft drinks bar. West Derby’s weekly paper did a story headlined “Kasbah [sic] Has New Meaning for Local Teenagers,” accompanied by the first-ever press picture of John in performance with the new Club 40, supporting its cutaway body on one white-trousered knee and clearly glorying in his power to reach the topmost notes on the fretboard.

  Among the Saturday-night regulars was Dorothy (Dot) Rhone, a petite sixteen-year-old from Childwall, whom John took to calling Bubbles, even though her hair didn’t have so much as a ringlet. Dot was drawn to his “rugged” looks the moment she set eyes on him but, learning that he already had a steady girlfriend, agreed to go out with Paul McCartney instead. Despite her extraordinary cuteness, she was even milder than Cynthia Powell and submitted without protest to the same rules from Paul that John imposed
on Cyn—total adoration, fidelity, availability, and revising her appearance and wardrobe to look as much as possible like Brigitte Bardot. “Paul was always supposed to be the charming one, but John was more compassionate,” she remembers. “When Paul and I had a row, he’d often tell Paul to be nicer to me.”

  In Mona Best’s happy combination of club and Enid Blytonish secret den, the Quarrymen seemed to have found an ideal home. Mrs. Best made them part of her family circle, frequently inviting them upstairs for cups of tea or meals in the rambling house, which was crammed with exotic mementos of her Indian upbringing. They grew particularly friendly with her younger son, Peter, a strikingly handsome eighteen-year-old whose reserved manner and crisply styled hair earned him frequent comparison with the film star Jeff Chandler.

  Then, on the Saturday night of October 10, everything suddenly turned sour. Ken Brown, the new fourth Quarryman, reported for duty with a bad cold. In her matriarchal fashion, Mrs. Best decided he wasn’t well enough to play and sent him upstairs to sit in the warm with her elderly mother. At the evening’s end, however, she still gave him his quarter share of the Quarrymen’s £3 fee. John, Paul, and George protested that, as Brown hadn’t performed, he shouldn’t be paid; when Mrs. Best stood firm, the three of them walked out in a huff.

  However John might blag about the rhythm being “in the guitars,” it was clear that if his group was to go on playing anywhere outside the art college’s basement, they had to find a drummer to replace Colin Hanton. But the task seemed a hopeless one. All the good players around were already comfortably ensconced in prestigious groups like Cass and the Cassanovas or Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, where their personalities as well as percussive showmanship often proved as great a draw as the singers. The Cassanovas had upholsterer John Hutchinson, aka Johnny Hutch, a famous tough guy, known to hit equally hard whether the skin in question covered drum or human jaw. The Hurricanes had Ritchie Starkey, a sad-eyed boy from the tougher-than-tough Dingle area whose love of flashy finger ornamentation had led him to adopt the stage name Ringo Starr.

  Musical nobodies John, Paul, and George might be, yet they still had the chutzpah to enter their names against the cream of Liverpool’s drummer-enhanced groups when heats for another Carroll Levis “Nationwide Search for a Star” competition was held at the Liverpool Empire. To camouflage the drummer problem, they appeared as a vocal trio with John in the center, minus guitar, resting one hand on Paul’s shoulder and one on George’s. It was an effective and rather daring idea, since Paul’s and George’s left-and right-handed guitar necks pointed neatly in opposite directions, and physical contact between young males, onstage or off, was still taboo.

  The need to pull out something special for Carroll Levis also finally extinguished that tired old skiffle handle, the Quarrymen. For days beforehand, John and Paul racked their brains for a new name with an American lilt that hadn’t already been taken by some other group, national or local. Their final choice was a nod to a currently successful U.S. instrumental act, Johnny and the Hurricanes, and also to rock ’n’ roll’s founding father, Alan “Moondog” Freed. When they took the stage for their first heat at the Empire, it was as Johnny and the Moondogs.

  They performed two Buddy Holly songs, “Think It Over” and “Rave On,” with enough panache to reach the area semifinals at the Hippodrome theater in Manchester on Sunday, November 15. As with John’s previous Carroll Levis experience, the winners were decided in an end-of-show finale, when the applause for each contestant was measured on Levis’s Clapometer. Unluckily, however, this climax came at a much later hour in Manchester than it had in Liverpool. Too poor to afford an overnight hotel stay, Johnny and the Moondogs had to leave before the finale to catch their last bus and train home. All three of them felt bitterly disappointed and cheated, though only John actively expressed his resentment of the competitors who were able to stay. “That night,” Paul remembers, “someone [in a rival group] was relieved of his guitar.”

  With no drummer in prospect, an easier and slightly cheaper way of strengthening the beat was to add one of the electric bass guitars now in general use around Merseyside bandstands. The electric bass with its fretted neck being relatively easy to play, John did not have to break in another outsider, but could simply invite one of his art college friends to make up a fourth with Paul, George, and him. During another late-night jam session at 9 Percy Street, he threw the bass player’s job open to both Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray—whichever was first to get hold of the requisite instrument. Rod set to work to build his own, using equipment in the college woodworking department to cut out its body and neck. He was just pondering how to electrify and string it when he found he’d been beaten to the post.

  Every two years, the Littlewoods football-pool magnate John Moores sponsored an exhibition at Liverpool’s illustrious Walker Art Gallery to which local painters and sculptors were invited to submit works. For the John Moores show of November 1959, Stu intended to offer one of his outsize abstracts, consisting of two eight-by-four-foot panels. With Rod Murray’s help, he took the first of the finished canvases to the exhibits’ assembly point, then got sidetracked by John and the others at Ye Cracke, and somehow never got around to delivering the second panel. Unaware that they were looking at only half the intended picture, the judges included it among only a handful of local entries to hang at the Walker. So enamored of Stu’s technique was the great John Moores that he bought the single panel for an impressive £65.

  The windfall allowed Stu to splash out on an impressive Hofner President bass guitar and step into the vacancy in John’s group. John reassured him that he’d soon pick up bass playing, since it didn’t involve learning “chords and stuff,” just simple, repetitive patterns over four strings rather than six. A friendly bassist with a rival group, Dave May of the Silhouettes, agreed to coach him in the rudiments.

  His college tutors, and several of his friends, felt that Stu was making a disastrous wrong turn. No one could have been a stronger supporter of John’s music than Bill Harry—as he would one day prove in spades. Yet he felt mystified, and rather let down, that someone at such exalted level in the visual medium should wish to start at the very bottom of rock ’n’ roll. “The image was what appealed to Stuart more than the music,” Harry says. “He loved the romance of it. And the fact that John wanted him in the group. He just couldn’t say no to John.”

  UNDER THE JACARANDA

  I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver.

  Just before Christmas, Mrs. Plant, the long-suffering owner of 9 Percy Street, had paid her property a surprise visit and been horrified by what she found. A cache of antique furniture awaiting renovation in the basement had been chopped up and used as firewood to warm the ex-Quarrymen’s practice sessions and John’s illicit nights with Cynthia. The Adam fireplace in Stu Sutcliffe’s studio had been torn out to create a contemporary open-hearth effect, and had since disappeared. (“We left bits of it all over town,” Rod Murray admits. “Like getting rid of a dead body….”) So outraged was Mrs. Plant by this wholesale vandalism that she gave every tenant in the building an eviction notice.

  By early January, Rod and Stu had found new accommodations at 3 Hillary Mansions, Gambier Terrace, a handsome Georgian-style block overlooking the unfinished Anglican cathedral. To share the spacious first-floor flat they enlisted three other college friends, Margaret Morris (known as Diz), Margaret Duxbury (known as Ducky), and John.

  Aunt Mimi was informed of his decision to leave Mendips with typical bluntness. “He told me, ‘Mimi, all the others have flats on their own…and anyway, I don’t like your cooking,’” she recalled. “He’d had it soft with me around to do all the cooking and washing for him. I knew even before he went that he couldn’t cope on his own. He didn’t even know how to light a gas-cooker, let alone cook a tin of beans. He told me he could live off ‘Chink food.’ I said to myself, ‘We’ll see, John Lennon, we’ll see.’”

  The flat consisted of three oversize bed
-sitting-rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a Geyser water heater, lit by a flame that responded with a threatening Woomph! if anyone tried to light it. As signatory of the lease, Rod chose the best quarters, at the front, with the cathedral view and fancy iron balustrade; John and Stu took the barnlike room at the rear.

  For John, the Gambier Terrace flat served two equally important purposes. It provided a place for him, Paul, and George to rehearse with their new bass player, his new flatmate. And it allowed him to spend unrestricted nights with Cynthia, albeit in conditions even more rough-and-ready than at Percy Street. The room he shared with Stu was also a communal art studio for the other tenants, and so permanently littered with shabby easels, half-squeezed paint tubes, empty bottles, misappropriated traffic signs, old fish-and-chips wrappings, and cigarette butts. “The floor was filthy,” Cynthia recalled. “Everything was covered with muck.” On mornings when the Geyser failed and they had to wash in cold water, they would arrive at college “looking like a couple of chimney sweeps.”

  But, as Mimi had predicted, it wasn’t long before John’s appetite for self-reliance waned and he began to miss the home comforts he had always taken for granted. “For about three weeks I didn’t hear from him. Then one night he arrived back on the doorstep looking very sorry for himself. I said to him, ‘I’m cooking dinner, do you want some?’ but he was too proud to admit that he was hungry or that he couldn’t stand living away. He went away again that night, but about a week later he turned up again. This time I was cooking a steak pie, and I didn’t bother asking whether he wanted any or not. That got him mad. He could smell the food and yet he was too stubborn, too proud, typical John really, to let on that he was hungry or that he’d made a mistake.