John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  One of the few art college friends with whom John kept in touch was Bill Harry, the curly-haired graphic-design student who first turned him on to beat poetry, Kierkegaard, and Saul Steinberg. Bill remained at college, though it seemed dull without John and Stu; he also still cherished the ideal they had formulated together as the Dissenters, that Liverpool should become as hallowed a name to Britain’s beat generation as San Francisco was to America’s. In the summer of 1961, his entrepreneurial nature turned idealism into reality.

  A prolific writer, trivia hound, and compiler of statistics, Bill had already edited various samizdat publications for the college and Hessy’s music store. His ambition, however, was to start a real newspaper to chronicle the city’s boisterous youth culture in a way the staid old Liverpool Echo never had. By spring, he had raised the £50 starting capital for a compact-size newsprint weekly, to be run entirely by himself and his girlfriend, Virginia, from one room above a liquor store in Renshaw Street. Its name—mixing together Kerouac, music, and the muddy river that nurtured it—was Mersey Beat.

  Its main role was to be an information exchange, allowing fans to learn when and where their favorite groups were playing. But Bill also sought articles and columns with a special insight into the beat music scene. Looking around for contributors, he remembered the nonsense stories and poems his fellow Dissenter wrote at college and half bashfully passed around among selected cronies at Ye Cracke. Before the Beatles’ departure to Hamburg in April, he asked John to write a brief history of the group for the benefit of their Cavern club following. Mersey Beat’s first issue appeared on July 6, four days after their return home. Half the front page was taken up by John’s contribution:

  BEING A SHORT DIVERSION ON THE DUBIOUS ORIGINS OF THE BEATLES

  (translated from the John Lennon)

  Once upon a time there were three little boys called John, George and Paul, by name christened. They decided to get together because they were the getting together type. When they were together they wondered what for after all, what for? So all of a sudden they grew guitars and fashioned a noise. Funnily enough, no one was interested, least of all the three little men. So-o-o-o on discovering a fourth even littler man called Stuart Sutcliffe running about them they said, quite “Sonny get a bass guitar and you will be alright” and he did—but he wasn’t alright because he couldn’t play it. So they sat on him with comfort ’til he could play. Still there was no beat, and a kindly old man said, quote “Thou hast not drums.” We had drums, they coffed. So a series of drums came and went and came. Suddenly, in Scotland, touring with Johnny Gentle, the group called the Beatles discovered they had not a very nice sound because they had no amplifiers. They got some.

  Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision—a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them “From this day on you are Beatles with an A.” Thank you mister man, they said, thanking him.

  John never expected the piece to be used—though even the faint possibility that it might had made him nervous enough to bring in George as a collaborator. Seeing his words in print for the very first time, exactly as he’d written them, thrilled him to the marrow. And, in common with all writers, that first byline awakened a hunger for more. Bill Harry remembers his calling at Mersey Beat’s office soon afterward with a thick bundle of his accumulated drawings, stories, and poems, some 250 items in all.

  Mersey Beat confirmed the Beatles as undisputed kings of the Liverpool group scene. John’s friend the editor lost no opportunity to write about them (though Bill was not one to award “puffs” without good reason). John’s own contributions proved so popular that Bill Harry gave him a regular space under the pseudonym Beat-comber—a pun on J. B. Morton’s whimsical Beachcomber column in the Daily Express. A typical example parodied Mersey Beat’s page-three entertainments guide, with Lennonesque transfigurations of city landmarks like the Pier Head and Bold Street as well as clubs like the Casbah, the Jacaranda, and the Odd Spot, restaurants like La Locanda, and ballrooms like the Grafton and the Locarno. Such was the addictiveness of being in print that he would even pay to insert small humorous ads in the paper’s classified section. The August 17 issue had five of these cod announcements, purchased at four old pennies per word and scattered among the serious ones to create a cumulative effect:

  HOT LIPS, missed you Friday, RED NOSE…

  RED NOSE, missed you Friday, HOT LIPS…

  ACCRINGTON welcomes HOT LIPS and RED NOSE…

  Whistling Jock Lennon wishes to contact HOT NOSE…

  RED SCUNTHORPE wishes to jock HOT ACCRINGTON

  During their stint at the Top Ten Club, the Beatles had decided that, since they’d arranged the gig without Allan Williams, there was no obligation to pay Williams his usual 10 percent commission. Not for the last time, John and Paul shirked doing the dirty deed themselves; instead, Stu Sutcliffe was deputed to write to Williams in what was his last duty as a Beatle. Williams responded with an aggrieved letter vaguely threatening to have them blacklisted by every talent agent in the universe if he were not paid. However, he took no action beyond expelling them from his client roster, thus sealing his destiny as “The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away” (or, as John would later have it, “The Man Who Couldn’t Give The Beatles Away”).

  With Williams out of the picture, their management was shared among several hands, and seemed little the worse for that. Mona Best’s Casbah club, and the rambling house above, still provided their main meeting place and operations center, as well as their tireless driver Neil Aspinall. Ray McFall, the Cavern’s owner, did as much as Bill Harry and Bob Wooler to keep them at their local pinnacle. It was McFall who first put them onstage with a nationally famous music act, booking them for a Cavern-sponsored Mersey cruise, or “riverboat shuffle,” on August 27, aboard the MV (motor vessel) Royal Iris as support to Mister Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band.

  The summer also brought a growing involvement with Sam Leach, whose beat promotions at the Iron Door club in Temple Street were Ray McFall’s main competition. Also situated in an old warehouse, the Iron Door was larger than the Cavern and a more grown-up, edgy place, serving alcohol as well as coffee and soft drinks. Though in many ways as scatterbrained as Allan Williams, Sam Leach had no doubt of the Beatles’ potential, and pursued a somewhat more coherent strategy for realizing it. He tried selling them to London pop agents like Roy Tempest and Tito Burns, but from each he received the traditional haughty southern brush-off: “We’ve already got 5,000 beat groups in London. Why should we need one from Liverpool?”

  With the approach of John’s twenty-first birthday in October, he began to have serious doubts that his career as a musician could advance much further. “I wasn’t too keen on reaching twenty-one,” he remembered. “[A] voice in me was saying ‘Look, you’re too old.’ Even before we’d made a record, I was thinking…that I’d missed the boat, that you’d got to be seventeen. A lot of stars in America were kids…. I remember one relative saying to me, ‘From now on it’s all downhill,’ and I really got a shock. She told me how my skin would be getting older and all that kind of jazz.”

  At times he even found himself wondering if he had been wrong to give up studying art and whether he could find any way back into it, preferably with Stu Sutcliffe not too far away, to bolster his self-confidence as of old. He wrote constantly to Stu in Hamburg—long, scrawly letters, devoid of his usual puns and misspellings, using almost plain English to lay bare what he called “a little part of my almost secret self” in all its anger, nihilism, and loneliness. From John’s perspective, Stu seemed to have found the perfect life, with his painting, with his studies under Edouardo Paolozzi, with Astrid and her warm-hearted “Mummy” to look after him, and with St. Pauli to play in after dark.

  But the idyll was not quite as John enviously imagined it. The intensity with which Stu now worked seemed to have brought disturbing changes in him, both physical and mental. He
had become painfully thin and begun to suffer blinding headaches and bouts of nausea against which ordinary domestic remedies had little or no effect. His mood could change abruptly, from the sweetness and mildness that had first captivated Astrid to furious accusations that on their last night’s round of the Reeperbahn bars she had flirted with other men. “His jealousy was the hardest thing for me to take,” Astrid says, ’because there was never any reason for it.”

  Astrid and her mother finally persuaded him to see a doctor and undergo tests, and in July he wrote to his own mother with the results. His life in and out of the Beatles these past two years had produced a grim inventory of ailments: gastritis (inflamed stomach lining), a shadow on his lung, a dodgy appendix, and a glandular imbalance that might account for his sudden mood swings. The Hamburg doctor ordered him to cut out smoking and alcohol, prescribed medication and a strict diet, and warned him not to delay having his appendix removed. In late August, he returned to Liverpool, intending to have the operation there, and bringing with him his Hamburg X-rays. The Liverpool specialist who viewed these, however, judged them all “within the limits of normality” and pronounced Stu’s symptoms to be “nervous in origin.” Furious at being accused of hypochondria, he returned to Hamburg without having the appendectomy.

  John’s twenty-first birthday presents on October 9 included the munificent sum of £100 in cash from his Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert. Seasoned traveler that he now was, he decided to spend it on a Continental holiday, inviting Paul McCartney to accompany him. The two just disappeared without explanation to George or Pete, despite a customarily packed schedule of Beatles gigs. They had intended to hitchhike to Spain, but instead went by train to Paris and remained there for two weeks, staying at a cheap hotel on the Left Bank. It was meant to be a total break from music, though they did visit a club in Montmartre and one night masochistically attended a concert by the laughable French rock-’n’-roller Johnny Hallyday. In the flea markets, they found an extraordinary innovation—jeans that were not drainies but bell-bottomed like the uniform trousers of British sailors. John and Paul bought a pair each but then, fearing the look “too queer,” slimmed them down to normal ankle-hugging dimensions.

  The main reason for detouring to Paris was that their Hamburg exi friend Jurgen Vollmer had recently moved there to become assistant to the photographer William Klein. Like Klaus Voormann and Stu, Jurgen wore his hair in the combed-forward French style, and, after a few days’ immersion in all things French, John and Paul decided they were finally ready to follow suit. It was only a mild version of what would become the Beatle cut, but it still changed John completely, making his face seem rounder, his nose sharper, his mouth more oddly feminine. The wedge of hair just clearing the shortsighted eyes somehow gave them an even sharper glint of subversiveness and mockery.

  When John’s birthday money was all spent, the transformed truants returned home to find hairstyles the last thing on anyone’s mind. The promoters they had let down were all incandescent with fury, and George and Pete Best were both on the point of quitting in disgust. Even John could not demur at the stern lecture they received from Bob Wooler, Ray McFall, and their other unofficial handlers about honoring engagements and behaving professionally.

  Fortunately, just at that moment, the irrepressible Sam Leach came up with a scheme that both reunified the Beatles as a band and reasserted their superiority over all local competition. Tired of promoting gigs in small halls and cellars, Leach began scouting for a venue where thousands rather than just dozens of beat fans could gather. He found it at New Brighton, a Wirral seaside resort that had once boasted a 544-foot steel facsimile of Paris’s Eiffel Tower. Though the tower had been demolished after the Great War, its immense ballroom continued to function, vaulted in baroque white and gold, with a sprung floor that could accommodate a thousand couples.

  On November 10, Leach hired New Brighton Tower Ballroom for what he named Operation Big Beat, a five-and-a-half-hour marathon attended by four thousand people, with the Beatles headlining over Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four, and Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes. The Beatles played one spot in the early evening, hurried back across the water for a show at Knotty Ash village hall, then returned to New Brighton for a second set at 11:30. The night ended with a wild car race with Rory Storm through the Mersey Tunnel, during which Rory’s car barely escaped a head-on collision.

  In later life, John would nostalgically recall those carefree months of going nowhere in particular, the camaraderie between the groups, and the freedom and spontaneity of their music. “We repeated the shows many, many times, but never the same. Sometimes we’d go on with 15 or 20 musicians and play together, and we’d create something that had never been done onstage by a group before.” He could only have meant a night at Litherland Town Hall when the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers amalgamated as “the Beatmakers.” Gerry Marsden sang and alternated on lead guitar with George Harrison, Pete Best shared the drumming with Gerry’s brother Freddy, and John and Paul were just sidemen on piano and rhythm guitar alongside Pacemakers Les Maguire and Les Chadwick.

  There spoke the monk rather than the performing flea—half-wishing they had left him alone to pound his piano anonymously in the background. “I’m talking about before we were famous, about the natural things that happened before we were turned into robots that played on stage. We would naturally express ourselves in any way that we deemed suitable. And then a manager came and said ‘Do this, do that, do this, do that’ and that way we became famous by compromise.”

  12

  SHADOWLANDS

  Yeah, man, all right, I’ll wear a suit—I’ll wear a bloody balloon if someone’s going to pay me.

  A recurring theme of Richmal Crompton’s William stories is the power that eleven-year-old William’s inventiveness and zest for life can exert over the most unlikely seeming adults. Time and again it happens that some high-powered celebrity arrives in the district to attend a formal grown-up function but instead finds his way to the Old Barn, where William and the Outlaws are putting on one of their shows. The truant VIP will pay a few pennies’ entrance fee and sit in his posh clothes on an upturned orange-box, more captivated by the performance than any of the village urchins around him. So did John’s life parallel William’s yet again when Brian Epstein happened on the Cavern.

  Brian was then aged twenty-seven and, to outward appearance, the last person likely to be found in old barns or caverns. The elder son of a well-to-do Liverpool Jewish family, he seemed blessed with all a young man of that era could ask—good looks, charm, and sophistication, allied to a seemingly fulfilling niche in life. He ran his father’s large electrical store, NEMS, in Whitechapel, the heart of the city’s shopping district. In the basement was a record department, which Brian had developed with such flair that it could justifiably advertise “The Finest Record Selection in the North.”

  But behind the suave exterior was a complex, troubled character who, prior to November 1961, considered his life to have been one of almost unmitigated failure. He had been expelled from school, ended his army National Service prematurely and under a cloud, and given up on an acting course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. Only after reluctantly entering the family retail business (which encompassed furniture and housewares as well as electrical goods and records) had he shown any positive abilities: clever salesmanship, meticulous administrative efficiency, and a knack for eye-catching presentation and design.

  Most troubling of all—overshadowing his whole unhappy adolescence, undermining his latter success and self-vindication—Brian Epstein was homosexual. In prejudice-bound Britain of 1961, especially in a city as ferociously macho as Liverpool, there was no worse burden for a young man to carry. Legislation originally passed in 1886 perpetuated the Victorian view of homosexuality as a “perversion,” an offense against every religious doctrine, and a creepingly infectious social disease. Sexual acts between males, however private a
nd consensual, were crimes punishable by imprisonment. Fear and loathing of the condition permeated every level of society, apart from the sheltered worlds of the theatre and haute couture. Anyone showing the slightest hint of effeminacy in manner or eccentricity in dress—suede shoes, for instance, or a waistcoat with brass buttons—could expect instant denunciation and persecution as a “queer,” a “homo,” a “nancy-boy,” or a “poof.”

  Brian’s upright and devout Jewish parentage meant a still more pressing need for secrecy and a redoubled burden of guilt and self-loathing. However, his problems did not end even there. Despite the endemic homophobia, many gay men were able to find happy and stable relationships with others like themselves. But it was Brian’s misfortune to be attracted to heterosexual males at the furthest possible remove from his own gentle and refined nature. To find gratification, he had to go curb-crawling in the city’s toughest dockside areas or cottaging (cruising) in public lavatories, putting himself in constant danger of police entrapment, blackmail by his pickups, or attack by the “queer-bashing” gangs that haunted such locales.

  Brian had known about the Beatles in a subliminal way for several months before officially discovering them. The NEMS shop in Whitechapel lay only about a minute’s walk from Mathew Street, and daily thronged with overspill from the Cavern’s lunchtime sessions, chattering excitedly about what they were about to see or had just seen. John, Paul, George, and Pete themselves were regular customers, usually seeking out-of-the-way import disks to bolster their repertoire. When Mersey Beat began publication in July, Brian had ordered large quantities to sell at NEMS. He even began to contribute a column about new record releases, which often appeared in proximity to some further Beatles update or zany jeu d’esprit by John. At his shop, Brian was no aloof executive figure, but prided himself on serving customers himself and taking a personal interest in their musical taste. From scores of habituées—tiny, blonde Patricia Inder among them—he would have heard plenty about the Cavern and its favorite sons.