by Bob Spitz
After the Cavern gig was over, the other members of the Quarry Men questioned whether the show had been worth the hassle. John felt they had turned a corner. The city may have been in the throes of a mad love affair with skiffle, but the natural evolution of teenagers augured a fickle heart whose beat was shifting to a more up-tempo rhythm, one in which rock ’n roll would prevail. Clearly, that seemed to be the sound calling to him.
Partly out of recognition of that change, Pete Shotton felt he was no longer equipped to remain with the band. He never liked participating to begin with, but the rigors of playing rock ’n roll demanded more than his thimbled fingers were able to contribute. The rhythm brought him into direct competition with Colin Hanton. At the Cavern, when John started to rock, Hanton occasionally hit a rim shot to sauce up the accompaniment. As Shotton recalls, “The sound of it got to me. I didn’t think it [was] right. So I told him, ‘Don’t hit it like that, it sounds awful.’ ” Instead of a compliant response, Hanton instructed him to “fuck off.” A few weeks later John and Pete crossed swords at a party, ostensibly over the washboard. They had played outdoors, at a birthday celebration thrown by Hanton’s aunt, who lived in Toxteth. Afterward, the best mates wandered inside her house with their instruments and chugged down a few pints each. They sat there convulsed with laughter while John tossed off jokes and wisecracks at other guests’ expense. Eventually, Shotton’s gaze drifted toward his lap, where the washboard lay balanced on his knees. He rocked it slightly, to draw his friend’s attention to it, and admitted what up till then had been tacitly unspoken between them: “I hate this, John. It’s not for me.” Shotton recalls being stunned by what happened next. “[John] picked up the washboard and smashed it over my head, just like that!” Pete says. “The tin part came out, and the frame was wrapped around my [shoulders].” Smirking slightly, John stared at the ridiculous scene he’d created and said, “Well, that solves that, then, doesn’t it?”
The real focus of their tension wasn’t the washboard or their friendship, however; it was the future of the Quarry Men. The band could not seem to generate momentum. Having outlived a brief honeymoon, during which John evaluated each band member and his contribution to the group, it became clear to him that, to continue at all, two elements were absolutely crucial: seriousness and ability. Shotton possessed neither quality. “It was perfectly obvious [to him] that I wasn’t musical,” Shotton says, “and John was taking the band seriously. [At last,] he really wanted to be a musician.”
A few obligations remained, for which Pete agreed to play, including one that his mother had arranged at the St. Peter’s garden fete, the most important event on Woolton’s social calendar. Otherwise, the band needed simple retooling. Perhaps replacing Pete wasn’t even necessary. Drums were all the percussion that was really needed, especially if the band moved further away from skiffle. But there were other cogs in the machine—namely, personality and ambition. It must have been unnervingly clear to John that he was never going anywhere with this gang.
The Quarry Men had run its course as far as a frolic was concerned. Len, Griff, Rod, even Colin—they were in it for a laugh. He couldn’t blame them for that, but somehow there was more at stake now for John Lennon. And here it was unraveling, slipping away. Sacking Pete, as it were, only precipitated the obvious destiny, though it is doubtful John could see it. With some distance he might have realized that it spelled the end of his band—and signaled the beginning of another.
Chapter 4 The Showman
[I]
The Quarry Men set out in pursuit of their dream at a time when the world, especially Great Britain, seemed poised to oblige them. An enormous shift was taking place, nudged on by the climax of World War II and wrenched sideways by its aftershocks. The leitmotif of postwar life was the idea of endlessly unfolding progress. Jet plane travel idled on the horizon, as did color TV and England’s first high-speed motorway. Many working-class families in urban wastelands were moved into council estates near the suburbs, or into newly created towns. And despite a 47 percent increase in the cost of living, the growth in wages nearly doubled, putting more money in people’s pockets than at any time in fifty years. As Harold Macmillan, in his July 1957 speech at Bedford Market Place, enthused: “Indeed, let us be frank about it, most of our people have never had it so good.”
And those who believe, as Donne contends, that all circumstance is “slave to fate” would glean further significance from the fact that John Lennon and a teenager who would become his closest friend and partner began the school year of 1957 in twin limestone buildings linked by a courtyard and located within a hundred feet of each other. “There was neither an affiliation, nor appreciable synergy, between the art college and Liverpool Institute,” Quentin Hughes indicates in his sage evaluation, “but the proximity was such that they invited a certain kinship.” If John’s awakening to rock ’n roll and the formation of the Quarry Men was a prelude to what was to come, the arrival of the boy across the street commenced the first act of the legend. His name, of course, was Paul.
On the surface, Paul McCartney had it made. He possessed not only the most striking physical characteristics of the McCartney clan but also the expansiveness of their humor, their passion for music, and their practice of urbanity so epitomized by his uncle, the family patriarch, Jack McCartney, who was described as being “one of nature’s true gentlemen.” In a city of characters distinguished by dry, pithy pragmatists, Jack may have been the one Scouser who played against part. Tall, gaunt, always relentlessly debonair, he was a bon vivant and brilliant spinner of yarns in a raspy, unearthly voice that held listeners in thrall. As a deputy of the ubiquitous Liverpool Corporation, the bureaucratic rat’s nest that ran the city, he feasted on its foibles like a stand-up comedian. Everybody had a smile for Jack McCartney.
Such was the role of a patriarch in a family of underprivileged Scousers who refused to be cowed by their circumstances. Jack, the eldest among the nine children of Joe and Florrie McCartney, was a man for the new age: gregarious, pleasure-seeking, and properly awestruck. All Joe McCartney’s children—James (Jim), Joseph, Edith, Ann Alice, Millie, Jack, Ann, Jin, and Joe (named for an elder brother who died young)—it was noted, were “gentle, happy-go-lucky dreamers” and, fortunately, resourceful, if not simply oblivious, in their efforts to avoid the city’s strong criminal undercurrent. Despite their inquisitiveness, each chose to remain Merseyside.
The McCartneys were a boisterous crew, alight with affection. In 1912, nine years after Jim’s birth, Joe moved literally around the corner and resettled the family in a new, cheaply constructed terrace house at 3 Solva Street in Everton, a residential district in northeastern Liverpool, roughly three-quarters of a mile from the city center. The McCartney place, at the beginning of a narrow, cobblestone cul-de-sac, was woefully small for an ever-expanding family, but really no different from any neighbor’s situation in the solid but overcrowded Irish enclave. One of the rare remaining photos of the house (it was demolished in the Liverpool Slum Clearance Program of the late 1960s) depicts a sad, deeply rutted structure stripped of any decorative amenity other than what was required to hold it together. It was a typical redbrick Victorian cereal box, with three stingy bedrooms outfitted like barracks and a front parlor whose threadbare couch was occupied in shifts to accommodate the extra-heavy traffic. The toilet—really little more than a hole, a hunch-down arrangement, below two horizontal boards—was in a shed out beyond the kitchen and was shared by two other families, the Dowds and the Simnors, with washroom facilities in even shorter supply. Each Saturday morning, all the kids grabbed towels, a washcloth, soap, and clean underwear and trooped over to the Margaret Street Baths, a public swimming pool, for their weekly scrubbing. For Jim McCartney, who had an almost feline fastidiousness about his appearance, extreme measures were required just to stay comparatively groomed.
Before the McCartneys arrived, in the early nineteenth century, Everton had been “a place to aspire to.” Built on a steep natura
l ridge known as the Heights, it was the most elevated point in Liverpool, invigorated by the pure sea air, with views over the Mersey and Liverpool Bay across to the Welsh hills. It was, according to J. A. Picton, “a suburb of which Liverpool had cause to be proud.” Compared with the unsavory city center, it was considered “a healthy place to live” and drew the wealthy upper crust of society to its lush parkland setting. Noble mansions, in tier above tier, looked out on a lovely landscape. The district’s dense roster of churches spoke optimistically of its expectations: an expanse of cathedrals dotted the landscape, not the least of which was stately St. George’s, the first cast-iron church in the world. But by 1860 its allure had all but evaporated. A victim in its own right of the Irish potato famine, Everton was transformed into a ghetto known as Little Dublin, the first terminal of swarming refugees, as inbred and overcrowded as Calcutta. By 1881, the onetime jeweled paradise had become the most densely populated area of the city, its patchwork fields clawed under to dower the mazy grid of roads thronged by “cottages,” which sounds pastoral but is actually a euphemism for cheap terrace houses.
Jim McCartney probably had little time to submit to the temptations that were everywhere on Everton’s streets. His days were devoted almost entirely to part-time work in order to compensate for his father’s insufficient salary at Cope’s Tobacco (Everton’s largest employer, where he worked for thirty-two years as a cutter), various household chores, and the duty of watching out for six brothers and sisters who were barely of school age. With brother Jack, he attended the nearby Steers Street School, a county primary named for the city’s first dock engineer, just off Everton Road. He was a decent student but “never really excelled” in any subject, and left school at fourteen, as soon as he was old enough for a regular job.
For an Irish lad in Liverpool, the priesthood was the highest work, but it was a calling from which the McCartney boys were “gratefully exempt.” “Joe put all his faith in the almighty pound,” says an old Everton resident, “and he raised his sons to believe employment came before godliness.” Jack, who found a rock-steady, if innocuous, position with the Liverpool Corporation, offered to “inquire there” on behalf of his vivacious younger brother, but Jim had a taste for something more exciting. Eagerly and with great expectations, Jim went to work as a sample boy in the office of A. Hannay & Co., one of the myriad cotton firms servicing the Lancashire mills, where he did what salesmen referred to as “the donkey work”—running along Old Hall Street with bundles of extra-long-staple Sudanese, short-staple Indian, or strict low middling Memphis cotton earmarked for brokers or merchants in various salesrooms. He worked ten-hour days, five days a week, for less than £1, plus a bonus each Christmas that often doubled his annual salary. The duties called for neither much initiative nor imagination, but in the process, Jim soaked up the ins and outs of the business—from grading and warehousing to negotiating and bookkeeping—much of it over stand-up lunches with salesmen at the local pub.
A jovial, effusive man with a penchant for deadpan humor and the idioms of the Liverpool Irish, Jim McCartney had a streak of romanticism in him that can be traced directly to the influence of music. The house on Solva Street was flush with it; one form or another provided a constant soundtrack to the raucous family soap opera that unspooled in the overcrowded rooms. Joe loved opera and played the cumbersome E-flat double bass in the local Territorial Army band that entertained regularly in Stanley Park and at the commemorative parades that snaked along Netherfield Road so often that they seemed biweekly occurrences. When he wasn’t marching, there were evening practices with his brass band at Cope’s Tobacco. And Joe often played the double bass at home, hoping to encourage his children to pursue some form of music.
As it happened, none of the McCartney kids showed much interest. It wasn’t until 1918, when a neighbor unloaded his fusty piano, purchased from the local NEMS store, on Joe that the gesture bore real fruit. In no time, Jim had taught himself a shorthand method of chording that allowed him to play along with popular songs of the day. He had a brittle, choppy style that suited the syncopation inherent to ragtime, whose melodies seemed to fill every dance hall and pub. Nothing made Jim feel more carefree than music, and his exposure to potent entertainers only heightened this passion. He and Jack stole off regularly to the Hippodrome and the Olympia, both ornate neighborhood theaters, to catch the latest music hall revue. Standing along the Hippy’s balcony wall, the McCartney brothers enjoyed acts such as Harry Houdini, Little Tich, the Two Bobs, Charlie Chaplin, Rob Wilton, George Formby Sr., and the Great Hackenschmidt. “My father learned his music from listening to it every single night of the week, two shows every night, Sundays off,” Paul recalled. Jim entertained every chance he got, playing for family gatherings and impromptu community mixers. While oppressive summer days brought Everton to an early boil, more than a dozen neighbors often congregated in the street below the McCartneys’ parlor window and danced to Jim’s accompaniment into the night.
Before he was twenty, Jim was already “the swingman of Solva Street,” a youngster preoccupied with pop music who would stumble home from work, stay just long enough for dinner, then hit the road, looking for a jam. During the early 1920s, he fronted his own band, the Masked Melody Makers, a quintet of like-minded musicians, including his brother Jack on trombone, outfitted in “rakish” black facecloths, who played irregularly at small dance halls around Liverpool. The same configuration evolved into Jim Mac’s Jazz Band, with a repertoire of ragtime standards and at least one original McCartney composition, “Eloise,” a bright-eyed but unwaveringly banal ditty.
Jim McCartney’s performing wound down in 1930, at precisely the same time he was promoted to the position of salesman. No longer restricted to side streets girding the Cotton Exchange, he threw himself into the friendly price wars waged with local buyers, and with his easy Scouse affability and natural charm, he quickly became a fixture in the market, “a born salesman who invited easy confidence and left an imprint of his personality on everyone he met.” In his demeanor, his generosity, his plainspokenness, his effusiveness, his intimacy, and his irrepressible wit, Jim, like Paul later on, proved an earnest, often devoted companion. People of both sexes were attracted to him. But having served such a daunting apprenticeship to an industry that rarely promoted men of working-class backgrounds, he dedicated himself single-mindedly to the job, shunning serious relationships for a period of almost ten years.
It wasn’t until June 1940, during one of the increasingly frequent German air raids over Liverpool, that Jim fell in love. That night, the family had gathered at the McCartneys’ new home in the suburb of leafy West Derby Village to socialize with Jim’s sister Jin and her new husband, Harry Harris. There was a great deal of excitement, with whimsical toasts made in honor of the newlyweds and vain attempts at song. One of the guests, a fair, round-faced woman with unruly hair and a tender, abstracted look in her eye, gazed at the proceedings as if she belonged somewhere else. She’d arrived with the Harrises poised and gracious, but soon settled quietly in an armchair, an unseen presence.
Her name was Mary Mohin. Her voice was soft and resonant, without a trace of the guttural Scouse accent that echoed around the room. Paul would later say that she spoke “posh,” which was the basic Liverpudlian knock on anyone who practiced the King’s English. In Mary’s case, her accent didn’t sound at all pretentious, having been drawn quite naturally from the melodic Welsh and cultured university cadences of various hospital staffs on which she’d worked. It was indicative of her overall character, which is to say she was an exacting person who sought to refine her circumstances through hard work and determination. Yet at thirty-one and unmarried, Mary was no longer considered “a prime catch.” At the age of fourteen, she had worked as a nurse trainee at Smithtown Road Hospital, where dormitory accommodations were provided. Afterward, she enrolled in a three-year general program at Walton Hospital, the main neurological facility serving northwestern Liverpool, rising quickly through the r
anks to become a staff attendant and eventually a prestigious state-registered nurse.
Remarkably, over the next seventeen years, there were no serious suitors in her life. “Mary was so career-conscious that she didn’t worry much about men,” says her sister-in-law and confidante Dill Mohin. A Welsh nurse who trained with and later worked alongside Mary explains how the job extracted an enormous commitment: “We were so immersed in our work,” she recalls, “no one was in any hurry to get married.” But if Mary Mohin harbored any regrets or disappointment in what had been dealt her, she never let on to a soul.
Jim, at forty, had settled into what friends considered “a confirmed bachelorhood.” Although he was about the same age as his father when he found a bride, he had shown no inclination toward marriage, and throughout the evening, the quiet guest who “wasn’t at all musical” did nothing to alter that facade. Had the festivities progressed as a matter of course, it is likely Jim and Mary would never have seen each other again. The reality, however, was more extraordinary. About 9:30, a blast of air-raid sirens rumbled across Merseyside. The Luftwaffe had resumed its habitual sorties, attempting to knock out the strategic port. Usually, an all-clear blew within the hour, but this time emergency measures lasted all night, so the McCartneys and their guests hunkered down in the cellar until dawn.
Despite such unromantic surroundings, Jim and Mary shared enough moments to kindle serious interest. She found him “utterly charming and uncomplicated,” delighted by his “considerable good humor.” With his steel-blue eyes, thin hair swept back from a high forehead, trim businessman’s build, and robust personality, Jim became an object of Mary’s disciplined interest.
She was no doubt enamored of his openly affectionate family as well, having been deprived of similar feelings in the Mohin house. The situation there had deteriorated soon after her mother’s untimely death in 1919 while giving birth to a fourth child. With her brother Wilf away in the army and two-year-old Bill in need of vigilant supervision, Mary, who was only twelve, found herself pressed into service. She looked after the family for two years and was predisposed to the maternal role until the spring of 1921, when her new stepmother, Rose, arrived. Rose was a witch, according to Bill Mohin. Elderly, embittered, reluctant to adapt, she was a scornful, iron-willed woman devoted entirely to a son and daughter from a previous marriage who’d accompanied her to Liverpool. It became instantly clear to everyone, especially Mary, that Rose had no love for domesticity, even less for sparing her new husband’s children. Within a year, the women had reached a point whereby they were unable to communicate. “Mary went to nursing school because she couldn’t stand being at home with her stepmother,” Dill Mohin recalls. “She’d occasionally meet her father on his rounds,” delivering coal by horse-drawn cart to Liverpool families. “That way, they could be together for a while. But because of Rose, she never went home again.”