John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Meanwhile, the plot to dump Pete Best and replace him with Ringo Starr was moving to fruition. Ringo himself was currently in Skegness, Lincolnshire, where Rory Storm and the Hurricanes had a summer residency at Butlins Holiday Camp. John and Paul secretly visited him there to sound him out; then Brian Epstein telephoned him with a formal invitation to join that was immediately accepted. A couple of days later, the still unsuspecting Pete was called into the NEMS shop and told by Brian that the others wanted him to go. None of them was present at the meeting, nor did any of them offer any personal regrets to Pete afterward. According to Bill Harry, John thought the matter had been handled in a “despicable” way. He went along with it nonetheless, to the disillusionment of many who had always respected his honesty and openness. Even Patricia Inder reproached him for choosing “the coward’s way out.”

  Ringo’s debut took place on August 18 at a deliberately low-key out-of-town gig, the annual dance of the Port Sunlight Horticultural Society. But that merely postponed the backlash from Pete’s numerous loyal fans among the Beatles’ following. When they first played the Cavern with Ringo, they found Mathew Street full of angry protesters and were heckled onstage by chants of “Pete Best for ever—Ringo never!”; as they came off, George was head-butted and given a black eye. Assailed on one side by a wrathful Mona Best, on the other by tearful customers in his own shop, Brian declared himself “the most hated man in Liverpool” and refused to visit the Cavern without a bodyguard. To compound the plotters’ discomfiture, Pete himself behaved with dignity and magnanimity, putting no pressure on his friend Neil Aspinall, as he might easily have done, to resign in sympathy as their driver and roadie.

  On August 22, Granada Television sent a film crew up from Manchester to record the Beatles playing at the Cavern for a magazine program called Know the North. This first professional film footage of them—the precursor of millions of miles to come—featured two R&B covers, “Kansas City” and “Some Other Guy.” Uniformed in leather waistcoats and slim-jim ties, bangs heat-plastered to foreheads, they already looked too good for their brickwork bower. Ringo kept the beat as if he’d always been there, though occasionally with a rather hunted look in his spaniel eyes. Amid the applause for “Some Other Guy,” Granada’s recording engineer picked up a still-dissident cry of “We want Pete!”

  The next day’s edition of Mersey Beat reported that the Beatles had received a firm date to record their first single for Parlophone and that Pete Best had left the group “amicably.” Later that muggy, rain-squally morning, at the Mount Pleasant register office, John married Cynthia.

  He had delayed breaking the news to his Aunt Mimi until the last possible moment, knowing only too well what her reaction would be. For Mimi, it was his final renunciation of all her care, protection, and direction—proof that, despite everything she had done, he was the same hapless drifter his father, Alf, had been. As a further gouge at her heart, she recognized Julia, her beloved, exasperating baby sister, even more than Alf throughout the whole affair: Julia blithely wasting her talent and throwing away her future; Julia the ever flippant, unpractical, and improvident; Julia walking into 7 Newcastle Road that day in 1938 and defiantly flinging her marriage certificate onto the table.

  Though initially volcanic enough to rattle Mendips’s Art Nouveau windows in their frames, Mimi calmed down somewhat as the realization dawned that John was at least “doing the right thing” and there would be no illegitimate baby, like Julia’s, to besmirch the family name. Since he was in his usual penniless state, she gave him £10 to buy Cynthia a wedding ring, though adamant that she herself would not be at the ceremony. On the night before, he paid her another visit on his own and roamed distractedly around the house, casting wistful looks at his old bedroom and his favorite reading and drawing niches in the morning room and living room, and muttering that he didn’t want to be married and become a father. In the end—so Mimi told the family later—he sat in the kitchen and actually cried.

  The marriage threatened to have disastrous consequences for John’s career with the Beatles, just as they finally seemed to be going somewhere. Most managers faced with such a threat to their teen appeal would immediately have tried to replace him with the requisite fancy-free bachelor. Brian Epstein, however, had the intelligence to realize that such an option did not exist and that the best must be made of the situation as it stood. Stronger even than Brian’s concern for his boys’ marketability was his desire to establish himself in their eyes—John’s, above all—as an all-powerful smoother of paths, solver of problems, and shield against life’s harsher realities. He therefore stepped in to stage-manage the whole wedding, such as it was, attending to all the details that were beyond John to cope with, and adding a touch of style to what would otherwise have been a gloomy occasion.

  Neither of the participants’ absent fathers, indeed, could have been more supportive or solicitous. It was Brian who obtained the special license needed for a marriage on such short notice; it was Brian who arranged for a chauffeur-driven car to pick up Cynthia and bring her to the register office, a star for the one and only time in her life; it was even Brian, rather than Paul or some art college crony like Jeff Mohammed, who acted as John’s best man. His wedding gift also happened to be a handy way of keeping Cyn measurably under wraps while John was away with the Beatles. Since (like Alf and Julia Lennon in 1938) the pair had no idea where they would live, Brian offered them unlimited, rent-free use of a flat he owned at 36 Falkner Street.

  Mimi, hurtfully, kept her vow not to attend. Cynthia’s mother, Lilian, briefly home from Canada when the news broke, had had to return the previous day, unable to change her boat ticket. Other than Brian, the only witnesses were Paul, George, Cyn’s brother Tony, and her sister-in-law Margery. The bride’s outfit was a rather well-worn checked jacket and skirt, brightened up with a blouse given to her by Astrid Kirchherr. During the ceremony, a jackhammer began rattling outside the window, almost obliterating the registrar’s voice and the responses. Afterward, in torrential rain, the party ran across the road to Reece’s restaurant for a chicken lunch at 15 shillings each, paid for by Brian. Since Reece’s was not licensed to serve alcohol, the toasts to the newlyweds had to be drunk in water.

  As had been the case with Alf and Julia, there were no wedding photographs—and no honeymoon. John spent his wedding night playing with the Beatles at the Riverpark Ballroom in Chester while Cynthia assembled the components of their first home. It was not the best augury for marriage or parenthood.

  13

  LUCKY STARS

  You can hear that I’m just a frantic guy doing his best.

  The whole story could very well have ended a couple of months from here. In October 1962, America discovered that Russia was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba that could reach Washington, D.C., and other key U.S. military centers within twenty minutes. The young, untried President John F. Kennedy warned Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev that if the missiles were not removed, America would invade Cuba, triggering the nuclear Third World War everyone had so long expected. For twelve tense days until Khrushchev backed down, humankind contemplated a future in which there would have been no Sixties, no Beatles, no John Lennon: no nothing.

  Contrarily, rather than scanning the horizon for mushroom clouds, Britons developed a sudden obsession with a part of their own backyard they had scarcely noticed before. Films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and A Kind of Loving, all based on bestselling novels, focused on north-country working-class life, seen through the eyes of an angry, alienated but unquenchably defiant young antihero. Millions each week watched the BBC’s Z-Cars, a police series of a new, grittily naturalistic kind, set in a Merseyside suburb modeled on Kirkby. Billions would ultimately watch Granada TV’s Coronation Street, a soap opera about ordinary lives in a back-to-back terrace located in Salford, Greater Manchester, but identical to the one in Toxteth where John’s Lennon forebears had grown up and wher
e some still lived. Thus, when he himself finally entered the spotlight, pop music’s self-styled “working class hero” would find the ground not totally unprepared.

  While America responded to the nuclear threat with stiff-backed patriotism, Britons positively gloried in the undermining of national values and morale. In 1961, four Oxbridge graduates, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett, scored a massive West End success with Beyond the Fringe, a satirical revue snapping at the sacred hindquarters of parliament, the military, and the church (its live cast recording, produced by George Martin, available on Parlophone). By 1962, the so-called “satire boom” had even reached BBC Television in a prime-time Saturday night show called That Was the Week That Was, fronted by an obscure cabaret performer named David Frost. The same year saw publication of Private Eye, a scurrilous and smutty-minded satirical magazine destined for a longevity rivaling Burke’s Peerage or Country Life. The satirists spoke in public-school accents yet came from lower-middle-or even working-class families; they wore patrician striped shirts and elastic-sided boots along with the flattop haircuts and shiny suits of parvenu pop stars. It was getting harder by the minute to know who was who.

  If George Martin had felt no qualms over the Beyond the Fringe team’s original material, he still was not convinced that Parlophone’s other “fringe” act had it in them to write a hit. For the Beatles’ debut single, therefore, he exercised his A&R man’s prerogative and chose a song out of the current crop on offer from outside writers. This was “How Do You Do It?” by twenty-year-old Mitch Murray, a playful ballad much like John’s and Paul’s own experiments in the same genre, but giving off chart potential as pungent as blue cheese. Martin had it put on a demo disk and sent it to Liverpool for the Beatles to rehearse before their recording session on September 4.

  In contrast with the friendly atmosphere of their June audition, this got off to the stickiest possible start. After an initial tryout, Ringo’s drumming was pronounced to be substandard, a pro session drummer was brought in to take over, and poor Ringo was relegated to bashing a tambourine. Then the Beatles gave “How Do You Do It?” a unanimous thumbs-down, protesting that its Pollyanna tone would make them a laughingstock up in Liverpool and clamoring to do a Lennon-McCartney song instead. Martin rejoined tersely that no Lennon-McCartney song he’d heard so far came close to this, and he was not going to pass up an obvious number one record. They responded with a classic Merseyside industrial “go-slow,” taping a version of “How Do You Do It?” in which every note and nuance of John’s lead voice made clear their utter apathy. Ramming the point home, John embellished its middle eight with a sarcastic “Ooh la-la” like an aural one-finger salute.

  Martin was not the type to yield to such pressure—and anyway the track still had charm and originality enough to merit release. But it happened that one Lennon-McCartney song from the June 6 audition, “Love Me Do,” had improved sufficiently meanwhile to become a contender. The fresh element was John playing harmonica in an intro and solo and as a bluesy skein throughout the vocal. This instrument of his Boy Scout boyhood had enjoyed a recent unexpected surge in the charts, first on Frank Ifield’s “I Remember You,” then—and more groovily—on “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel, a white Texan with one of the “blackest” sounds around. Back in June, Channel had done a show with the Beatles at New Brighton Tower Ballroom, and his harmonica player, Delbert McClinton, had spent fifteen minutes teaching the “Hey Baby” riff to John.

  After intensive polishing at Abbey Road on September 4 and in a further session a week later, the schoolmasterly figure in the control room was satisfied. Martin agreed to shelve “How Do You Do It?” and use “Love Me Do” as the A-side, with “P.S. I Love You” on the B-side.

  In the labyrinthine bureaucracy that was EMI, each label head submitted his proposed new releases to a committee of senior executives for formal approval. Almost without exception, the musical mandarins who had to green-light “Love Me Do” were baffled by it. Most assumed that, with performers named the Beatles, it must be another of Parlophone’s trademark comedy records. John’s part of the harmony sounded more mocking than pleading; the beat kept stopping with a jokey cymbal smash; even the “Hey Baby”–ish harmonica seemed to be covertly laughing up its sleeve; only Paul McCartney’s plaintive solo “Whoa-oh, love me do” seemed entirely on the level. Compared with the complex instrumentation and sound effects of current hits, it had a stripped-down, almost naked feel, to quote the critic Ian MacDonald, “like a bare brick wall in a suburban sitting-room.” Amid the rampant Americana, real and ersatz, it was unmistakably British and unapologetically northern; a first breath of Z-Cars and Coronation Street blowing off the TV screen and onto vinyl.

  The single was released on October 5, with all the halfheartedness a mighty organization could muster. In Liverpool, although Mersey Beat trumpeted it to the skies, there was some disappointment that the Beatles’ first record did not better convey their onstage personality. Apart from a vast window display in Brian Epstein’s NEMS store, promotion was confined to a few microscopic ads in the record-trade press and some scattered spots on the BBC Light Programme. Like EMI’s top brass, the rather aged and supercilious disc jockeys of the day presumed that a name like the Beatles could not be serious, so introduced “Love Me Do” in the spirit of a joke without a punch line. For the four themselves, the most exciting moment was its first play on Radio Luxembourg, through Continental static still almost as thick as when Elvis’s first messages had come through to John under the bedclothes at Mendips six years earlier.

  If EMI would not do it, Brian had to find other ways to show that his boys had reached a whole new level. In July, Gene Vincent had made his first visit to Liverpool since the chaotic Boxing Stadium spectacular of 1960. Back then, John had been just a wistful face in the crowd; now, as old Hamburg buddies, Vincent and the Beatles played the Cavern together on one of the wildest, most asphyxiating nights it had ever known. A candid camera caught John under the arches with Gene and Paul, restored to black leathers for that one evening only, and giving a final, almost wistful “Don’t mess with me” look before compulsory suits, ties, and smiliness overwhelmed him.

  The release of “Love Me Do” coincided with an even bigger blast from his past. A Southern promoter named Don Arden had brought Little Richard to Britain on a tour coheadlined by America’s main black heartthrob of the moment, Sam Cooke. Brian contacted Arden and arranged that his legendary import would give a one-night performance at New Brighton Tower Ballroom on October 12, with the Beatles second on the bill and a string of other local groups in support. For Merseyside at least, there could be no clearer proof of their having joined the immortals.

  This was, alas, not quite the same Little Richard who had screamed John’s blood awake with “Good Golly Miss Molly.” The wild licorice-whip locks had been planed flat, the glittery gold zoot suit replaced by conventional thin-lapeled sharkskin, the former joyously mindless glare on the mustached, mascaraed face exchanged for a disconcerting look of thoughtfulness and piety. Since hearing the Word of God, Richard had been disappointing audiences the world over by regularly refusing to sing any music other than gospel. Holy or not, short-haired and charcoal-grayed or not, meeting this supreme icon of their misspent schooldays was the Beatles’ greatest gift from Brian to date. “He used to read from the Bible backstage,” John remembered. “Just to hear him talk, we’d sit around and listen….” Initially, they were too shy even to ask Richard to be photographed with them; instead, Paul’s camera-buff brother, Mike, took his picture from the wings in midperformance, with Paul and John watching reverently on the opposite side.

  The Little Richard show was such a success that Brian brought him back for a second appearance with the Beatles on October 28, this time at the Liverpool Empire, topping a bill that also featured nationally known acts like Craig Douglas, Jet Harris, Kenny Lynch, and Sounds Incorporated. It was the day that the Cuban missile crisis was resolved, Russia stood down he
r offshore nuclear threat to America, and World War Three did not happen after all. As midevening news bulletins repeated that mankind was saved, John walked onto the hallowed stage he had last trodden with his Quarrymen hoping to be a Carroll Levis Discovery.

  Despairing of any significant support from EMI, Brian decided to recruit his own PR team to promote “Love Me Do” and introduce the Beatles to the still largely oblivious national media. His first valuable acquisition was Tony Barrow, a young Liverpudlian who worked in London as a copywriter for Decca Records but also contributed a widely read record column to the Liverpool Echo under the pseudonym Disker. Having advised Brian unofficially on PR for some months, Barrow was invited on board in November 1962. “I was introduced to the Beatles in a pub called the Devonshire Arms, near EMI headquarters,” he remembers. “And I’ll never forget John’s opening line: ‘If you’re not queer and you’re not Jewish, what are you doing working for Brian?’ It wasn’t actually in front of Brian, but he was within earshot.”

  Since Barrow was still officially employed by Decca, his publicity releases on behalf of “Love Me Do” were issued via a nineteen-year-old PR man named Tony Calder, who worked out of a shared one-room office in Poland Street, Soho. “I liked the record,” Calder says. “I told Brian the first thing he had to do was bring the Beatles down to London to meet some journalists. National papers didn’t cover pop then; I was talking about music papers, the trade press.

  “So the boys came down and I spent a whole day taking them around the various offices, doing half an hour in every place. Paul did all the talking; John hardly uttered a word. Our last appointment was at around six o’clock, with this git of an editor in a white Brinylon shirt who thought he was God Almighty. When the Beatles walk into his office, the first thing he says is ‘It’s all over for guitar groups.’