by Bob Spitz
Typically, Rod Davis managed to extract a valuable service from the disappointment. He says, “We got a lesson in showmanship. We didn’t win because of the other group’s antics, and that was where the germ of performing came over [us].” For John, however, the letdown was crushing. He had hoped to capitalize on a win in the talent show, wielding it as a magnet to attract work. Come the end of June, he’d be finished with Quarry Bank, shorn of his security blanket, such as it were, and forced to consider a trade. It was a destiny he pushed further and further from his mind. “I was just drifting,” John acknowledged. “I wouldn’t study at school, and when I was put in for nine GCEs [General Certificates of Education], I was a hopeless failure.”
[V]
Despite the largely unsatisfying result of their talent competition, the Quarry Men pushed on. Nigel Walley, who had quit school at the age of fifteen to become an apprentice golf pro, came up with their “first real engagement” of note at the club where he worked. Lee Park had been founded by a collective of Liverpool’s Jewish families who, having been denied membership in almost every Merseyside club, desired a social sanctuary for their community. One afternoon during a round of golf with Dr. Joseph Sytner, a member whom Walley lionized as a “great tipper,” Nigel broached the subject of his alternate existence managing the Quarry Men. Sytner’s son, Alan, who “was crazy for jazz” and had run two jazz clubs—the 21 Club, in Toxteth, and the West Coast, on Dale Street—was launching yet another venture that had so far attracted considerable attention in Liverpool. Called the Cavern and situated accordingly belowground in an old produce warehouse, it was modeled after Le Caveau Français Jazz Club, a Parisian haunt Alan had visited on holiday, and had been financed by the £400 inheritance he’d received on his twenty-first birthday. Since its official launch in January, the club had showcased a stellar lineup of traditional jazz bands whose fans thronged the subterranean den nightly. Nigel didn’t care a whit for trad jazz, but he’d heard that Sytner filled intermissions with the Swinging Bluegenes, a “sophisticated skiffle” band that played traditional standards such as “Old Man Mose” and “Down by the Riverside” with a “jazzy rhythm section.” If it wasn’t too much to ask, Nigel proposed to his teemate, “Would your son give us a shot at [playing] the Cavern?”
Sytner, who knew Nigel well and liked the boy, said he would be happy to arrange something; however, first he wanted to hear the group for himself. “Can you bring them down to the golf club one night?” he asked. Nigel volunteered the Quarry Men’s services for the club’s upcoming social committee reception quicker than he could yell, “Fore!” Once again, no pay was involved, but Dr. Sytner said, “We’ll feed and water you. The rest is up to your group.” If everything came off as expected, they’d be assured of at least an audition at the exclusive Cavern.
The Quarry Men regarded the Lee Park “gig” as even more crucial than the Carroll Levis show. The audition aside, there was the matter of vindication, a chance to prove to themselves that they were worthy of commanding such a venerable audience. But the real plum was the billing: they were the evening’s solo attraction, which meant they’d need to put on a full-scale show, they’d have to entertain.
“John reacted as though we were playing the Palladium,” Shotton recalls. For him, a country club triggered images of poshly dressed socialites, standing in a haze of perfumed cigarette smoke while sipping cocktails from triangular-shaped flutes and basking in unforced elegance. He had an immediate attack of grandeur, suggesting to the others that they wear “real uniforms” out of respect for their position as headliners at such a ritzy affair. On its face it seemed absurd that a cash-poor skiffle band without much experience should worry about smartening up for a party of outcast Jews. A brief discussion ensued in which it was decided to dress respectfully but authentically: white shirts (out of respect) with black jeans (to maintain the edge). Everyone gave his consent, except for Rod Davis, whose parents found jeans repugnant and forbade him to wear them. The lads fretted over this dilemma for a moment, until finally even the upstanding Davis acknowledged the gig’s importance and arranged to buy a secondhand pair from Mike Rice at the usurious price of 37 pence.
The night of the performance, the Quarry Men felt in fine form. They had arrived a few minutes before seven o’clock, while the old guard club members were finishing dinner, and were impressed with the fastidious arrangements. Says Nigel Walley: “We played in the club’s downstairs lounge. They had moved all the chairs back to make it look like a music hall. A little stage had been set up, and to our surprise they’d provided a microphone, which was as scarce as money in those days. It gave John a real boost; he was chomping at the bit to get at it.”
Half an hour later, the audience started filing in—and not the twenty or so punters they had expected, but seventy-five to a hundred distinguished-looking people primed with enough liquor to give the room a gentle buzz of excitement. That seemed to raise the bar a few notches. Feeling flushed, the Quarry Men scrambled to tune their equipment. (Contrary to popular myth, John was completely capable of tuning his own guitar, Eric Griffiths insists.) A minor catastrophe was averted when Rod Davis bent for his banjo, splitting the zipper on his contraband jeans, but John cleverly instructed him to lengthen his strap so the instrument would hang low enough to conceal the tear.
As for the show itself, the Quarry Men had never been better. They careened through a dozen or so songs with relative spryness, feeling only “a slight tension [from the audience] toward the odd rock ’n roll song” mixed into the skiffle-heavy selection. But nothing could dampen John’s exuberance at the mike. When the spotlight fell on him, he responded like a moth to the flame. There was an unusually bluff spontaneity to his repartee, the velvet-smooth touch of a more seasoned entertainer. “John was very witty that night, throwing off one-liners and quips,” says Nigel Walley, who watched bemusedly from the sidelines while the crowd struggled to muzzle their laughter at each new inventive Lennon wisecrack. “In between numbers, he [came] out with the funniest lines. Someone in the crowd would say something and John would twist it into something else. They chuckled at everything he threw at them. It was fantastic.”
Despite a few off-key mishaps, the appearance was an unqualified, cracking success. “They were even nice enough to pass the hat around afterwards,” Walley recalls. “We wound up with fourteen or fifteen pounds, which was a lot more than we [would] ever [get] paid in the clubs.” To say nothing of its being their first paying gig!
The night also paid another dividend. As the audience dispersed, the band’s potential benefactor approached, shaking outstretched hands like a politician. They could tell Dr. Sytner’s reaction simply by the brilliant grin plastered on his face. He made no attempt to conceal his delight. The members, he told them, had roundly enjoyed the Quarry Men’s performance. In a reception area outside the lounge he reported to Nigel that he’d “thoroughly appreciated” the band’s attitude and wit as well. “That’s a real professional group you’ve got there,” he said, not mentioning a word about the Cavern or his son. Walley initially determined to bring it up but declined, thinking, “There was only so far that I could push the matter.”
In the end, there was no need. Alan Sytner called Walley a week after the Lee Park show and offered the Quarry Men the opportunity to make their debut appearance at “a big-time music club.” In actuality, the so-called gig was nothing more than a guest spot—they’d play what was known as the “skiffle interlude,” a few songs, at most, sandwiched between the evening’s two main jazz attractions—but it would be the first of many bookings that would transform the Cavern into an international mecca.
The Quarry Men managed to play only a few scattered dates before the end of the school term. No gig was too small to fill their impoverished dance card. They made appearances at the St. Barnabas Church Hall and at St. Peter’s Youth Club, which were both done gratis. They were also featured performers at a Quarry Bank school dance. John became progressively more confident
at introducing numbers, making humorous patter, and singing, while his sidemen did a fair job of hanging together instrumentally. The trouble was, their wiring was so agonizingly basic: three chords strummed like a baker grating apples to songs that demanded little else. John continued to play skiffle with élan, but his thoughts turned more and more to rock ’n roll. Skiffle was outlaw ballads, populist struggle, protest songs, rural blues, and folklore of the American Plains. Rock ’n roll came from the streets and “the jungle”; it had a young, aggressive energy that seemed to provoke expression in a changing world.
Throughout the spring of 1957, John binged on the bumper crop of music slowly making its way to Britain. School lunch periods were devoted exclusively to searching out new sources, and come noon each day John would break away from Quarry Bank, taking either Pete Shotton or Eric Griffiths with him as he followed up each lead like a sleuth piecing together a case. They checked out Woolworth’s, W. H. Smith, several shops on the Allerton Road. His legwork eventually led to Michael Hill, a fellow classmate who, it was discovered, had “a great collection of American [rock ’n roll] records,” to say nothing of the early jump and blues artists, which were a revelation. Hill lived a few blocks from school, near Penny Lane, and since his mother worked, the boys could spend an unchaperoned hour or two sampling 78s in the empty house. By some miracle, Mike Hill owned the entire Elvis Presley oeuvre, as well as singles by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Johnny Otis, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino. “He also had records by the Dutch Swing Band,” says Pete Shotton, “which wasn’t our genre, but we… loved them.”
One afternoon as the boys picked through a lunch of chips and cigarettes, John was struck speechless when Hill dropped the needle on a copy of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” As recalled later by John: “[Mike] said he’s got this record… by somebody who was better than Elvis. When I heard it, it was so great I couldn’t speak.” John was beside himself, overwhelmed by Little Richard’s hoarse, howling vocal accompanied by a savage boogie-woogie bass line and barrelhouse piano that never faltered from the breakaway opening until the last decisive beat. “We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, not even in my mind. How could they be happening in my life, both of them? And then someone said, ‘It’s a nigger singing.’ I didn’t know Negroes sang.* So Elvis was white and Little Richard was black.”
John was already feeling a little shaky about his faith in the almighty Elvis. Eric, for one, noticed that although John treasured those early hits, “some things just didn’t click with him.” Recalling a day in 1957, on their way to afternoon classes, he says they took a hasty detour, busing into Liverpool instead to catch a matinee of Love Me Tender. “We sat in the cinema in Lime Street and killed ourselves laughing at [Elvis]. John thought he was ridiculous.” And yet, that fiasco, an artistic misfire, seemed to take none of his enjoyment away from the music. Almost immediately the Quarry Men began practicing “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “All Shook Up,” easy, poky versions, just shy a spark plug or two, that would satisfy the band’s itch for rock ’n roll without alienating the skiffle crowd. (They also took a stab at “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” the flip side of “Long Tall Sally,” but without much success.) “We started doing even more numbers by Elvis,” says Colin Hanton, who, as a drummer, welcomed every chance to pick up the languorous beat. “The audiences were beginning to ask for it; John was feeling it. We were ready to move on.”
But readiness was no substitute for talent.
The first real indication of trouble came during the band’s debut at the Cavern, sometime during the late spring of 1957. The Cavern was enemy territory, as traditional a jazz club as traditional jazz could muster: restricted, segregated, as exclusive as an autopsy, it was the sanctum sanctorum of Liverpool’s aficionados, with its own “would-be intellectual” clientele who were inflexible when it came to worshipping their righteous music. Inside, you were either for them or against them, and naysayers be damned. Only a year earlier, jazz pianist Steve Race, writing in his Melody Maker column, sounded the siren for a holy war against the heathen tongue. “Rock and roll is a monstrous threat, both to the moral acceptance and the artistic emancipation of jazz,” he warned his confreres. “Let us oppose it to the end.” The Cavern was the tabernacle for people who preached this absurdity like gospel.
The Quarry Men spent a fair amount of time preparing for the Cavern show, sorting through material, tightening arrangements, battling nerves as the date loomed near. Until the Quarry Men, John had little if any sense of the stability—and responsibility—that came with being in a band. Suddenly, he had the nucleus of a family, the subject for a meaningful (albeit unorthodox) education, the sneaking suspicion of pop stardom, and the attention he craved. “By this time, John thought he was Elvis Presley,” says Shotton. Whereas before, disagreements would come to a point of impasse, he now began exerting his authority, demanding artistic control.
To that end, John could be cruelly dismissive. He revealed flashes of pique at a rehearsal just prior to the Cavern date, when the band was practicing “Maggie May.” Rod Davis, who applied to banjo the same kind of aptitude he demonstrated for schoolwork, began crabbing his hand up the instrument neck, playing intricate chord inversions he had learned from a self-instruction book. John abruptly stopped the music. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said with a sneer. Davis tried explaining that it was the same chords played on different frets, for effect, but John cut him off. “You’ll play the same chords as me and Griff,” he insisted, glowering. A moment followed when neither boy said anything; it was reminiscent of a scene from an American western, when two gunslingers face off, waiting to see who intends to draw first. Davis isn’t sure whether the sound he was making cut through the other instruments too loudly or whether John, able to play only three chords, was jealous. But it is reasonable to assume that John didn’t like being showed up. Not this way, not in his band. Rod backed down, knowing better than to confront John. At school he had seen Lennon in action and considered him a bully, eager to prey on weaker boys. “He was a punch-up artist… a pretty good scrapper, whereas I was hopeless,” Davis admits.
The friction carried into the Cavern, where the two boys argued over the song list. At rehearsal, it was clear which way John intended to take the band. “Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis—all of those [artists’ songs] were inching into our repertoire,” Davis recalls. “He was turning us into a rock ’n roll band.” It wasn’t that Davis necessarily objected to that direction, but as a boy who played by the rules, he thought they’d be cutting their own throats at this juncture. “Because there was this major confrontation between rock ’n roll and jazz, you had to be careful what you played in front of whom. There were some venues where it didn’t matter, but if you [played rock ’n roll] in a jazz club like the Cavern, it was like going into Woolworth’s and shouting: ‘Marks and Spencer!’ It was a way of courting sudden death.”
The only thing the boys agreed on, entering the Cavern that first time, was what a creepy place they’d encountered. The entrance, a tiny doorway on an otherwise deserted street of warehouses, was right out of a Vincent Price film. There was a dismal solitude to the setting, enveloped, as it was, in an orb of cold, misty light thrown by a solitary bulb. Had the door creaked open to reveal a Transylvanian count, they might have run the other way. Most of the way down the steep, dark stairway there was no clue the passage actually led anywhere—no sound rose from the darkness, no flickering light at the end of the tunnel. The only sign of life was a stench that grew fouler and muskier as they progressed downward. Eventually the stairs bottomed out into a vestibule of sorts, which emptied into the club, itself a dank cellar in three sections separated by archways. The middle section, where the stage bisected a wall, contained roughly forty chairs from which people could watch the performance. The two outer sections were reserved for dancing and milling about. The room, although ill-conceived, insufferably hot, and claus
trophobic, was nevertheless, in the opinion of the Quarry Men, well suited to its purpose. The acoustics were good, and the crowd could see the stage from practically anywhere in the cellar.
John disliked jazz almost as much as he hated jazz fans. He bristled at the clubgoers that drifted in, dressed alike in their duffel coats, jeans, and baggy sweaters. “From the beginning, we started arguing onstage,” recalls Davis. The band opened up with a trusty Donegan number, but then John cued the others for “Don’t Be Cruel.” Davis, who stood on his right, leaned over and whispered, “You can’t do that. They’ll eat you alive if you start playing rock ’n roll in the Cavern.” Determined, he completely ignored Davis and launched into the song. Says Rod, “You could tell the audience was uneasy about it, but that didn’t stop John. He was just going to continue and expected us to follow. I kept trying to persuade him, to no avail. He did several rock ’n roll numbers until it became clear that the powers that be were unhappy.” At some point, Alan Sytner sliced through the crowd and handed John a note on which was written: “Cut out the bloody rock ’n roll.” But anyone watching the slight, spectacled boy racing from song to song and drifting from one musical form to another knew he was not going to be deterred, whether by this crowd or by any other.