by Bob Spitz
John Lennon had followed—and rejected—Tommy Steele as cheap costume jewelry. Far more stimulating to him was the debut of Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle craze that exploded in mid-1956.
At first glance, Anthony James Donegan and John Lennon would hardly seem made for each other, aside from the coincidence of their birthplace in “the North.” Ten years older than John, Donegan was from Glasgow, where he grew up in a world crowded with accomplished musicians, thanks to his father, who was first-chair violinist for the National Scottish Orchestra. His own talent, however, was somewhat less endowed. The stringed instruments he mastered showcased songs as opposed to scores, prompting a rift in the family orchestration. Tony left home at seventeen to undertake a vague but essential odyssey; he changed his first name to honor blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson and, after a stint in the national service, joined the Ken Colyer Band, one of the mainstays of the traditional jazz-club circuit.
When Chris Barber left Colyer’s band to form a rival outfit in 1951, he created the Washboard Wonders from his rhythm section as a confection to fill intermissions. He’d play his trademark double bass (instead of using a washtub-and-broomstick contraption), accompanied by drummer Beryl Bryden on the washboard and Donegan on guitar, performing an odd assortment of American blues, spirituals, and folk songs that seemed to galvanize the mixed crowds. One of those numbers, “Rock Island Line,” appeared on the Barber LP New Orleans Joys in 1954 and was “requested so often on radio programmes that [in 1956] it was eventually issued as a single” that climbed steadily to the top of the charts. The song itself generated excitement through its whirlwind, almost manic tempo, but it was the offhand charm of skiffle that captured the country’s imagination. Rock ’n roll was too much, too fast; as perceived by most British parents, it was confrontational, rooted in social taboos such as violence and sex, and thus unacceptable as an escape. Skiffle was a compromise. It cranked up pop music’s intensity level several notches, away from the torchy commiserations of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “Who’s Sorry Now.” But the songs’ homespun familiarity, filled with the socially conscious rhetoric of the Depression era, brought a measure of respite to a culture in rapid international decline. And Lonnie Donegan was its perfect spokesman. With his scrawny body planted conspicuously center stage, Lonnie launched headlong into songs as though each was regulated by a stopwatch, galloping along whip and spur, building up kettles of speed, until it was inevitable that he either stomped on the brakes or self-destructed. His performances weren’t so much musical as melodramatic.
Skiffle enthralled Liverpool audiences, not because it was new but because it was so unexpectedly familiar. In it, they heard the influence of country-and-western music, which had long enjoyed popularity among sailors and dockhands who trolled the Merseyside wharves. There was a time, right after the war, when Liverpool was regarded as “the Nashville of the North” for its rich deposit of attractions; local groups such as Hank Walters and the Dusty Road Ramblers, the Blue Mountain Boys, Johnny Good and His Country Kinfolk, and nearly forty contemporaries performed regularly throughout the 1950s, introducing the latest country rave as soon as another ship anchored in port. But while country and western had its share of admirers, it was skiffle that created a sensation.
It wasn’t long before most of the 328 venues affiliated with the Liverpool Social Club Association were involved in some sort of skiffle-related show. Even restaurants and department stores got in on the action. Over the next few months, British teenagers would seize this primitive, readily accessible new sound and make it their own. Skiffle bands sprouted wherever there were people to exploit the family laundry equipment. Compared with other types of music, it was child’s play. “Rock ’n roll was beyond our imagination,” says Eric Griffiths, who soon after hearing Lonnie Donegan began working on his mother to buy him an inexpensive guitar. “[But] skiffle was music we could play and sound okay [doing] right away.”
More than any other member of the Woolton gang, Griffiths was prepared to give this skiffle business a fair spin. He eventually acquired a practice instrument and signed up for a few lessons with a teacher in nearby Hunt’s Cross who advertised in the local newspaper. Desperate for someone to share his enthusiasm and experience with, he appealed to several boys in the neighborhood, many of whom expressed curiosity, but the only one who took him up on it was John Lennon.
[IV]
Even before he got a guitar, John would pantomime playing one, striking a pose in front of his bedroom mirror and stomping determinedly across the floor until his aunt Mimi ordered him to desist. He spent endless hours lip-syncing songs on the radio, the popular ballads, like “Singing the Blues,” “Little White Cloud,” and “Jezebel,” that clung so tenuously to the national charts, as well as occasional skiffle numbers that appeared on the BBC’s playlist.
From time to time, John took the bus into Liverpool and stared longingly at the guitars in the window of Hessy’s, a music store in Whitechapel that carried the city’s best selection of instruments. If you bought a guitar there, John knew, Frank “Hessy” Hesselberg threw in free instruction, with classes of three or four beginners taught by his showroom manager. And yet, despite the opportunity to study with a teacher, Mimi steadfastly refused John’s appeals. She wouldn’t hear of it, arguing that guitar playing pertained to teddy boys and “was of no worldly use” to him.
His mother, Julia, warmed easily to the subject and was more approachable. During her daily visits to Menlove Avenue, John would bring it up at opportune times, reminding her how much she herself enjoyed playing the banjo. But Mimi’s objections posed a real dilemma. She’d borne the responsibility for John, after all; Julia couldn’t very well undermine her sister, not after the effort she put into raising him. “Perhaps next year,” she told her son, “when you are finished with school.”
This was small comfort to John, who was determined to have his way, no matter if it meant playing the sisters against each other. He came across an advertisement in Reveille for an inexpensive guitar that was “guaranteed not to split.” All that separated him from owning it was £5 10 s., and after much cajoling on John’s part, Julia relented and “lent” him the money on the condition that the instrument be delivered to her house instead of Mimi’s. The steel-string guitar, a production-line Gallotone Champion, was constructed out of lacquered wide-grain maple, as opposed to the customary alpine spruce, with white piping and black trim, in a style part cowboy, part Spanish, and wholly unspectacular. Its body was significantly smaller than the arched f-hole models popular with most Liverpool musicians and lacked even a standard pick guard. “It was a bit crummy,” John admitted in retrospect. But as guitars go, it was sturdy enough to hold a note, despite the stubborn action, and John immediately commenced to diligently wrestle with it to produce a persistent, if lacerating, sound.
It remains a mystery as to how John broke the news to his aunt, although it is reasonable to conclude that when he finally produced the guitar she sighed dramatically, as was her wont, and accepted its place in her house as fait accompli. Years later she would seize the opportunity to claim that it was she, and not in fact Julia, who bought John’s first guitar, going so far as to invent a new price and provenance, but by that time the specifics were irrelevant. By that time, John and his guitar were part of history.
Chapter 3 Muscle and Sinew
[I]
Some ideas seem so obvious when they are presented that you just naturally assume a proprietary right to them. That was how John Lennon felt when George Lee proposed they form a skiffle band. Lee, a fifth-year Quarry Bank student with dark, curly hair, encountered John and Eric Griffiths during their lunch hour one day in early March 1957. The three boys shared a congenial smoke out by the bike shed and “began chatting about music in earnest”—what songs they especially liked, which artists they admired, whose arrangements were most compelling.
At a point near the end of the conversation, George Lee, brimming with enthusiasm, suggested that
they pursue their passion in a more active, enterprising manner. “We should start our own skiffle band!” he blurted out, as if it were a completely revolutionary idea. In fact, the phenomenon had caught fire in Liverpool months before, with new bands sighted more frequently than steamships, but it was still relatively rare at Quarry Bank. As early as February a school group had formed there called the Kingfishers, more noted for its trailblazing than its talent; otherwise, they were on virgin ground.
A skiffle band: John was intrigued, to put it mildly. It made so much sense, “he had difficulty concentrating on anything else that day.” After school, he and Eric bicycled breathlessly to George Lee’s house for some further discussion. “We should form our own band,” he told Eric afterward on the sidewalk, safely out of Lee’s earshot, signifying a sudden shift in personnel. By Eric’s own admission, they considered George Lee “a fancy little character” who should be rejected simply “because he wasn’t part of our gang.” Moreover, they sensed that Lee’s excitement was just a whim. “John and I took it seriously,” Griffiths insists; there was no room in the picture for fence-sitters. (Undeterred, Lee eventually started a competing band, the Bluebirds.) They both had new guitars, and John began accompanying Eric to lessons in Hunt’s Cross, where their painstaking teacher “aspired to make us guitarists, when all we wanted was to play a few chords and start ‘blues-ing.’ ”
After two lessons, John had had enough. He responded wretchedly to anything structured, and guitar instruction was no exception. There were too many rules, not enough instant payoffs. Ever resourceful, Julia knew exactly how to resolve the matter. As an adequate banjo player, Griffiths says, “she retuned our guitar strings to the banjo and we decided to play, from then on, [by] using banjo chords.” That meant they “tuned the bottom three strings all the same,” according to Rod Davis, who over the years has mastered a number of stringed instruments, “and played banjo chords on the top four strings,” which simplified the process. “It took me about two years, on and off, to be able to strum tunes without thinking,” John recalled.
“John picked it up easier than me,” Griffiths says. “[He] was more musical than me in terms of… sorting out what the chords were.” Julia taught them how to play G, C, and D7, which was enough to accompany any number of popular songs. To get them started, she applied the triad to “Ain’t That a Shame,” Fats Domino’s first hit, and demonstrated the method, singing along in a carefree, zesty voice.*
With that much under their belt, John and Eric were soon working out their own informal arrangements. After school, they met at Menlove Avenue, holed up in the parlor or upstairs in John’s bedroom, where they tried learning, without much success, other rock ’n roll songs they’d heard on the radio. “We were [too] limited by the few chords [we knew],” Griffiths recalls. Normally, this would have produced divots of frustration, although in this case the boys hit on an alternative. Griffiths, who was as headstrong and only slightly less impatient than John, suggested they switch gears, perhaps try something simpler. As they soon discovered, playing “Rock Island Line” was a cinch using the three basic chords. It required little skill and few nimble changes to pull off, providing something of a confidence boost. The same went for “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Alabamy Bound,” and “Cumberland Gap.” As they progressed, John and Eric responded by shuffling a selection of manageable rock ’n roll numbers into their skiffle repertoire, simplifying the form of “That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Mean Woman Blues” to suit their meager ability.
John threw himself into the practices, which took place daily after school, usually at Mendips or occasionally at Eric’s house on Halewood Drive. He was completely uninhibited about singing, belting out each number the way he imagined an entertainer would deliver it. But John’s was a provincial voice, hundreds of miles away from the urban toughness of his heroes. It was achingly beautiful and honest in a way that underscored its raw vulnerability, and yet the delivery was powerful—there was a clear quality of whimsy that shadowed each line he sang, a kind of half-cast vocal smirk juxtaposed with stinging emotion, as though it weren’t enough simply to sing a lyric when you could comment on it as well. “John was a born performer,” Griffiths says without equivocation. “You could sense that when he sang. It lifted him, he was energized [by it].”
Both boys soon grew dissatisfied with their after-school practice sessions. They were too confining; nor were they social, expressive, or theatrical enough. “We wanted to play to people,” Griffiths says. “That was our objective from the start. It didn’t matter where we performed, either, as long as we were playing in front of [an audience].” When John finally announced that it was time to assemble a band, Eric didn’t so much as blink.
[II]
There were few things that Pete Shotton put beyond his best friend, but when John invited him to join a skiffle band, he was dumbfounded. They had been walking across the field out beyond Quarry Bank High School, ruminating over some musical triviality, when John confronted him with it in much the same way he asked about dancing class. “Should we start a band, then, Pete?” he asked evasively. Shotton, who hadn’t a scintilla of musical ability, assumed John was making fun of him. He cursed and snapped, “I can’t be bothered!” But a trace of rejection in John’s face warned Pete that he’d misread the situation. Laughing to recover the bonhomie, Shotton said, “Don’t be silly—I can’t play anything.” That was all it took to revive John. Instantly, the fantasy was rekindled. “It doesn’t matter,” John said encouragingly. “You can get a tea chest [washtub] or a washboard and just have a plunk-plunk. We’ll sing our songs… like on the Bank. We can have a laugh, right? Let’s have a laugh.”
Upon hearing about the band, Pete’s mother, Bessie, contributed a washboard she found in the shed, along with some thimbles from her sewing gear. “Mum was very supportive of this,” he recalls, despite the fact that she considered “cheeky” John Lennon to be a “bad influence on her beloved son. She liked the fact we were doing something constructive… and the idea of her son [being] in a band was thrilling [to her].”
But Pete secretly loathed the undertaking. While he shared John’s love of music and the package it came wrapped in, he “absolutely hated” the idea of participating in a band. For one thing, he was shy in front of strangers, mortified by having to stand up in public and sing, “playing this silly piece of tin.” That he wasn’t musical caused him to feel humiliated in front of his more talented friends; strafed by this insecurity, he was convinced, albeit wrongly, that it diminished him in their eyes. But he was John’s best mate, determined to give his friend what Mimi had thus far refused to provide: encouragement, even at the expense of his own displeasure.
Shotton, in turn, persuaded another classmate and neighbor, Bill Smith, to throw in with them. Smith, like Pete, had no musical experience, which didn’t detract from his eligibility; what he had was an old washtub that proved expendable and was thereby coveted by the band. By attaching a broomstick-and-rope getup to it, one could simulate a bass sound merely by leaning one way or the other, adjusting the rope’s tension and plucking. Truthfully, it made no difference what note was played as long as the constant thumping provided some grave, resonant bottom—a trick that Smith, or just about anybody, could pull off.
Meanwhile, Eric Griffiths recruited Rod Davis to play banjo. The instrument was an oddity—a five-string Windsor model, unusual because it replaced the standard extra peg on the neck with a brass tube that conveyed the fifth string from the neck to the machine head, but for £5 there had been no reason for Davis to pass it up. “I took it to school [that] Monday,” Davis recalls, and encountering Eric Griffiths, he exclaimed, “Eric, I got a banjo yesterday.” Griffiths, who was eager to get the band under way, seized the opportunity. “Oh,” he said, “do you want to be in a group?” Davis was caught off guard, not only by the invitation but by Griffith’s apparent lack of interest in whether he could even play the banjo. Davis reminded his friend that he couldn’t so much a
s finger a chord. Griffiths assured him that it wouldn’t be a problem.
“Count me in,” he eventually told Griffiths, and made plans to attend a practice after school, at Pete Shotton’s house.
There were too many boys to assemble inside the Shottons’ house on Vale Road, so Pete’s mother sent them out back, to the garden, where an old corrugated-iron bomb shelter, exposed on one whole side, stood abandoned in the leaves. It was bitter cold in the yard, not for the fainthearted, and the four boys, bundled in sweaters, huddled under the damp metal shell with its reflected light pooled between them, hugging their shoulders and rubbing red, chafed hands in an effort to recharge their circulation.