John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  A local freelance photographer was on hand to capture them apparently blowing their big moment in agonizing detail. For once, they were wearing uniforms of a sort—dark shirts, matching jeans with patch pockets oddly outlined in white, and cheap two-tone Italian shoes that Parnes, in the half-light, mistook for “tennis shoes.” John and Paul had decided that the way to catch the great man’s eye, and distract his attention from the flawed lineup, was to leap and jump around like Elvis at his most hyperactive. In painful contrast to these joined-at-the-hip ravers, self-conscious George barely moved at all, while Stu, as usual, was too ashamed of his poor bass playing even to face his front. Behind this mismatched ménage sat their temporary drummer, Johnny Hutch, in ordinary street clothes, making his feelings clear with every passionless roll and perfunctory cymbal smash.

  The audition, as expected, proved to be a carve-up among Merseyside’s heavy hitters. The plum job of backing Billy Fury went to Cass and the Cassanovas, while Derry and the Seniors were hired for Fury’s stablemate, Duffy Power. But, despite the Silver Beetles’ lack of luster, something about them appealed to Larry Parnes. It so happened that Parnes also needed backing musicians for another of his artists, Johnny Gentle, who was booked for a Scottish tour from May 20 to 28. The Silver Beetles, to their astonishment, were offered the job at a fee of £18 each.

  Though its dates fell smack in the middle of college and school term time, there was no question of anyone turning it down. George had by now left Liverpool Institute to become an apprentice electrician and, like Tommy Moore, could take the time as holiday. Paul, theoretically cramming for his GCE A-levels, persuaded his father that a spell of traveling around Scotland would give his brain a rest. Stu and John simply cut college classes for a week, a decision that horrified Stu’s teachers—and his mother Millie—because he was just about to take his finals. John did not tell Mimi about the tour, knowing too well what a storm of protest it would unleash. A week was about the maximum time he could disappear off her radar screen without making her wonder what he was up to.

  There was a general feeling that, as employees of Parnes, however junior and temporary, they should adopt stage names after his own well-tried principle. So Paul became Paul Ramon, thinking it had a sultry, tango-dancing feel; George became Carl Harrison in homage to Carl Perkins, the writer of “Blue Suede Shoes”; and Stu became Stu de Stael after the Russian abstract painter Nicolas de Stael. In later years, John would deny with some annoyance that he did follow Cass’s advice after all and identify himself with the peg-legged sea cook of Treasure Island. “I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver,” he wrote to music journalist Roy Carr more than a decade later, “I always preferred my own name…. There was one occasion when a guy [Cass?] introduced me as Long John and the Silvermen…in the days of old when they didn’t like the word Beatle!! I’m actually serious about this…it gets on my TIT!” But according to Paul, “He was Long John throughout that Scottish tour…and he was quite happy to be Long John.”

  Johnny Gentle was, in fact, yet another fellow Liverpudlian, a former merchant seaman named John Askew who had first found his voice by singing to fellow crewmen and passengers (although, of course, no one wanted to know about any of that). Aged twenty-four, he was the usual mix of brawny good looks and big hair from the Parnes cookie cutter. But despite extensive promotion as a gentler alternative to Fury and Power, he had not yet made any impact on the UK record charts.

  He did not meet his new backing group until they came off the train at Alloa, a small town on the River Forth. There was time for only half an hour’s rehearsal before they went onstage together at the Town Hall in nearby Marshill. This first show was so bad that Parnes’s Scottish copromoter, a sometime poultry farmer named Duncan McKinnon, almost sent the Silver Beetles back to Liverpool on the next train. But Gentle liked them and managed to convince McKinnon they would improve with practice.

  Any illusions about the glamour of rock-’n’-roll touring melted away quicker than a Scotch mist. The six remaining gigs were not in big cities like Glasgow or Edinburgh but remote towns scattered up the northeast coast and deep into the Highlands: Inverness, Fraserburgh, Keith, Forres, Nairn, and Peterhead. The venues were ballrooms, municipal buildings, or agricultural halls, with Gentle heading a bill otherwise composed of local singers and groups. He and his five sidemen traveled together with their equipment in one small van, driven by a McKinnon employee named Gerry Scott. “We were playing to nobody in little halls,” George remembered, “until the pubs cleared out, when about five Scottish Teds would come in and look at us.”

  While Gentle, as the star, was accommodated in hotels, the sidemen had to make do with shared rooms in grim Highland boardinghouses and bed-and-breakfasts, where Calvinist texts decorated the walls and light and heat were measured out by coin meter. Thanks to their rock-bottom allowance from Parnes, they could afford to eat only in the cheapest workmen’s caffs and fish-and-chip shops. John’s cold comfort holidays at his Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, away to the west, seemed luxurious by comparison.

  As things turned out, few Scottish teenagers even realized they were watching “Long John” Lennon, Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison, and Stu de Stael—or even the Silver Beetles, for that matter. Press advertisements and posters billed them simply as “Johnny Gentle and his group.” There had apparently been some loss of nerve over the new name: a gig at Lathom Hall on May 14 saw them truncated to the Silver Beats, and, according to Johnny Gentle, they had reverted to calling themselves the Beatals by the time they reached Alloa.

  Fortunately for them, the star was a through-and-through Scouser whose life in the Parnes stable had not made the least swollen-headed. So John, Paul, and George put themselves out for Johnny, conscientiously learning his Ricky Nelson ballad repertoire, goosing it up with livelier Presley numbers like “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.” He in turn did what he could to make them more like a conventional, uniformed backing group. “They’d come without any proper stage clothes,” he remembers. “George had a black shirt and I had one, too, that I didn’t wear. So I let them have that, and we scraped up enough money between us to buy another one so that at least their three front men would look roughly the same.”

  On their van journeys through the Highlands, John took the lead in quizzing Gentle about life as a teen idol and the quickest route to achieving it. “He was inquisitive about everything…what was Billy like…what was Marty like…should he and the others go to London and try to get discovered…where would they stay? He was going places, and he knew it even then. At one place after we played, he and the others got pushed aside by some girls crowding round to get my autograph. John shouted out ‘That’ll be us some day, Johnny.’”

  The long intervals of discomfort and boredom that had to be endured gave extra edge to John’s sarcastic tongue and his impulse to pillory human weakness or frailty wherever they revealed themselves. Tommy Moore, the group’s too-elderly drummer, was a frequent target of Lennonesque practical jokes—often cruel, usually pointless, sometimes perpetrated for an audience no larger than himself. As Tommy lay in bed at night, John would softly open the door of his room, lasso his bedpost with a towel, then pull the bed by slow degrees toward the door. However tireless the baiting of Tommy, he got off lightly in comparison with Stu Sutcliffe. It was as if standing onstage with the Hofner president like a sunburst millstone around his neck robbed Stu of everything that had made John respect, or even like, him. The others took their cue from John, mocking Stu’s musicianship and appearance, making sure he always got the van’s most uncomfortable seat, the metal ledge over the rear wheel. “We were terrible,” John would later admit. “We’d tell him he couldn’t sit with us or eat with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did.”

  Inverness found the star and his group for once in the same overnight accommodation, with the bonus of a pretty view across water. Here it emerged that Billy Fury was not the only Parnes singer in the arcane business of writing his own material. Gen
tle, too, had already composed several Buddy Holly–ish songs, and he took advantage of this respite to work on a half-finished ballad called “I’ve Just Fallen.” John, who was listening in, mentioned that he did “a bit of songwriting” and suggested that Gentle’s middle eight—the gear change after the opening couple of verses—didn’t quite work. He had a spare middle eight, he said, that Gentle was welcome to put into the song.

  We know that we’ll get by

  Just wait and see.

  Just like the song tells us

  The best things in life are free.

  Although never to make the charts, “I’ve Just Fallen” had a respectable enough career ahead of it. A year afterward, the producer John Barry picked it up as an album track for Britain’s then most successful pop star, Adam Faith. In 1962, Gentle himself recorded it as a B-side under the new name of Darren Young. That simple minor-key middle eight—for which he received neither credit nor payment—thus represents the first John Lennon words and music ever to be professionally recorded. Ironically, both versions appeared on Parlophone, the label that soon would spout out his hits like a geyser.

  En route from Inverness to Fraserburgh, Gerry Scott, the van driver, was feeling hung-over, so he asked Johnny Gentle to take a spell behind the wheel. At a confusing road fork, Gentle turned the wrong way and hit an approaching car head-on. The impact hurled a sleeping John from the back of the van into the front and sent the piled-up stage equipment cannoning into Tommy Moore with such force that two of his front teeth were loosened. The first arrivals at the crash scene were a pair of teenage girls from a nearby house; recognizing Gentle, they took the opportunity to collect autographs from him and his five dazed companions.

  Fortunately no police were involved, but Tommy Moore had to be driven to a hospital suffering from concussion. Despite his traumatized state, there was no question of Tommy being excused his so-crucial role onstage. While he was still being treated in the emergency room, John turned up accompanied by the show’s promoter and virtually frog-marched him off to duty. He had only a confused memory of playing that night, full of painkilling drugs and with a bandage around his head.

  Things went rapidly downhill from there. The sidemen had by now spent all their small subsistence allowance from Larry Parnes, but had seen no sign of the second installment Parnes was meant to send them via Allan Williams. For the tour’s last couple of days, they were reduced to semivagrancy, skipping out of cafés without paying and sleeping in the van. Good-natured Johnny Gentle, who suffered no such hardships, offered to telephone Parnes on their behalf to chase up the missing payment. When Gentle seemed not to be pitching it strongly enough, John grabbed the receiver. “He didn’t hold back. It was like ‘We’re fuckin’ skint up here. We haven’t got a pot to piss in. We need money, Larry!’” Gentle remembers. “Anyway, it seemed to work because Williams did send them up a few pounds more.” Stu’s mother also made a contribution to help pay for their train tickets home.

  If the Scottish tour did little for the Silver Beetles’ finances (Tommy’s girlfriend was horrified to think how much more he could have made in a comparable period at Garston bottle works), at least it put them on a significantly improved footing back in Liverpool. Johnny Gentle sang their praises to Larry Parnes, saying he would happily tour with them again and urging Parnes to put them under permanent contract. But Parnes had enough on his plate with solo singers like Dickie Pride, the so-called “Sheik of Shake,” who was prone to drink, drugs, and stealing cars. He preferred not to risk multiplying such headaches by five.

  In any case, the Silver Beetles had by now acquired a manager-cum-agent in Allan Williams—albeit one who would always regard the office more as a burden than a privilege. Williams began handling their Merseyside bookings under the same loose arrangement he had with their one-time gods Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Derry and the Seniors. In between, they were granted a second-string residency in the Jacaranda basement, appearing every Monday, when the West Indian steel band had the night off.

  Early in June, an arts festival at the university brought the celebrated young poet Royston Ellis on what he intended to be only a short visit to Liverpool. Nineteen-year-old Ellis was a beat poet in the literal sense, having conceived the unprecedented notion of fusing highbrow spoken verse together with lowbrow—or, rather, no-brow—live rock ’n’ roll. Other than John Betjeman, he was the only British poet regularly seen on prime-time television, when he would read his work backed by, among others, Cliff Richard’s Shadows and the future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

  After his Liverpool University gig, Ellis gravitated to the Jacaranda, there falling into conversation with “a dishy-looking boy” whose name turned out to be George Harrison. Later that evening, George took him to Gambier Terrace to meet John and Stu. They all hit it off so well that Ellis was invited to miss his train from Lime Street and stay over on one of the mattresses on the floor. During his stay, he showed his new friends a useful aid to staying awake in their all-night lives as musicians and artists. Ordinary nasal inhalers, sold over the counter at every drugstore, contained wicks impregnated with Benzedrine. One had only to break the plastic tube and chew the wick inside to get the same effect as any expensive pep pill. “I also told them that statistically one person in every four was homosexual,” he remembers. “John’s eyes widened at that.”

  Since Ellis had plenty of money and was an enthusiastic cook, the cuisine at Gambier Terrace during his stay improved dramatically. His most ambitious culinary effort, a chicken pie with mushrooms, unfortunately got left for too long in the decrepit gas stove and burst into flames, almost setting fire to the whole kitchen. John, he recalls, was fascinated by the idea of combining rock music and poetry, and awed that someone of his young years should already have published a poetry collection. Ellis replied that his real ambition was to turn out prose for the lucrative mass market; as he put it, he wanted to be “a paperback writer.”

  To wind up his visit, he gave a poetry reading at the Jacaranda, backed by John, Paul, George, Stu, and Tommy. The event was such a success that Ellis urged them to forget their college, work, and school commitments and just go for it in London, the way he himself had done from Pinner, Middlesex, three years earlier. His valediction, so he claims, was to end their wavering between Silver Beetles and Beatals, and nail the pun properly at last. It should be “Beatles,” he told John, as a double play on beat poetry and beat music.

  There has probably never been a title whose authorship was more fiercely disputed. But Ellis’s stay at Gambier Terrace and this final, irrevocable name change undoubtedly did coincide. Early June brought two regular bookings over the water in Cheshire for the same promoter, Les Dodd: one at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard, Wallasey, the other at Neston Institute on the Wirral. For the Grosvenor gig, the Wallasey newspaper advertised the Silver Beetles, “jive and rock specialists”; a local press story on their Neston debut a few days afterward called them the Beatles. This second mention still listed the pseudonymous Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison, and Stu de Stael, but the name of “their leader” was given as plain John Lennon once more.

  The Scottish tour had left Tommy feeling more battered than his drums, not to mention grievously out of pocket; he was also tired of the sarcasm and backbiting that John ceaselessly orchestrated against Stu, and—as a conscientious workingman—appalled by John’s beatnik philosophy. “Lennon once told me he’d commit suicide rather than get a conventional job. “‘Death before work’—those were his very words. His girlfriend, Cynthia, was sitting in the front seat of the van at that time.” On June 11, Tommy failed to rendezvous with his colleagues at the Jacaranda for that night’s appearance at the Grosvenor Ballroom. Yielding to pressure from his girlfriend, he had decided to return to his more lucrative job on the forklift at Garston bottle works, so becoming the only person ever to resign from the Beatles.

  The gap was temporarily filled by a picture framer named Norman Chapman, an accomplished spare-time percuss
ionist whom they happened to overhear late one night practicing alone in an office building close to the Jacaranda. Chapman proved amenable to joining them and fitted in well enough, but he had time to play only three gigs at the Grosvenor—including an impromptu reunion performance with Johnny Gentle—before being spirited away as one of the very last victims of National Service. The Beatles were beatless yet again.

  With no outside promoter willing to book them, almost the only work to be had through that hot Mersey midsummer was in Allan Williams’s own ever-growing entertainments empire. Williams’s newest venture was a strip club in Kimberley Street, just off Upper Parliament Street, grandiosely styled the New Cabaret Artists Club and run in partnership with a West Indian calypso musician known as Lord Woodbine. Here during their virtually gig-free July, the Beatles made a one-shot afternoon appearance as backing group to a stripper named Janice, with Paul McCartney taking the drummer’s seat. In terms of eroticism, it barely packed the charge of John’s college life-drawing class, particularly since Janice expected her musicians to play appropriate mood pieces like “The Gipsy Fire Dance” from sheet music.

  Around the middle of the month, Allan Williams was drinking at Ye Cracke when he fell into conversation with a couple of out-of-town journalists. They said they were from the Empire News, the dullest of Britain’s downmarket Sunday papers, and were researching a feature article on how college students managed on their state grants. Seeing a chance to get himself into the article, Williams held forth at length on the poverty of Liverpool art students (omitting to mention his own opportunistic employment of them as decorators and strip-club musicians). He then took the journalists to John and Stu’s Gambier Terrace flat, introduced them to its occupants, and hung around while interviews were conducted and photographs taken.