The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  But no one other than John took such sartorial liberties. There had been a clangor about him from the start, an “intimidating air” of self-parody. His appearance was “so over the top,” the effect so “exaggerated and conspicuous,” according to another classmate, that it seemed calculated to attract attention. “I imitated Teddy boys,” John recalled, “but I was always torn between being a Teddy boy and an art student. One week I’d go to art school with my art-school scarf on and my hair down, and the next week I’d go for the leather jacket and tight jeans.” Ann Mason, a student in the painting department who also happened to be in the canteen, recalls the impression John cast on the others sitting there. “He was quite a sight,” she says, adding, “shocking, but also ridiculous, because he was the only one in a teddy boy outfit. Nobody else at college was interested in that trend. As artists, we were conceited enough to think we were before the fashion, rather than following it. [T]o those of us who weren’t of his mind-set, the more in fashion someone tried to be, the more out of it they seemed. So, after the initial impact, we didn’t take much notice of anybody like John.”

  Everyone ignored John’s outlandish display—everyone, that is, except Bill Harry. “Ah—he’s the unconventional one!” Harry recalls thinking at the time. “I’ve got to get to know him.”

  No one could have predicted a more improbable friendship: Harry, the soft-spoken little leprechaun, perpetually amused, with a tense, troubled smile, and an air of sorrowful endurance that dated from his father’s early death and the abject poverty it imposed on his childhood, and Lennon, whose outbursts were barely contained, boisterous and cynical, with an indifference wrought from Aunt Mimi’s pampered custody. Whereas John had bumbled through a posh grammar school, Bill fought his way, literally, through the gritty St. Vincent’s Institute, where even the priests would “bang you upside the head” to make their point and where students ultimately jumped him, kicked in his appendix, and left him for dead, an incident that caused his penniless mother to transfer him to art school. Not until Bill latched onto his cousin’s science-fiction books did his artistic aptitude bear fruit. Devouring them by candlelight (there was no electricity in the house), he eventually started his own science-fiction magazine, Biped, at the age of thirteen, working until dawn illustrating it, along with Tarzan comic books and fanzines. By the time he got to art college, his ambition was in full bloom. “They gave me a room… with a desk, a typewriter, and a copy machine,” Harry remembers, “and I [started] a [school] magazine called Premier.”

  More than sharing a talent for drawing, John was drawn to Harry’s offbeat brand of humor, a confection of double entendres and puns that coalesced in a guerrilla satire group, the Natty Look Society, which gained notoriety by posting whimsical illustrations on the college bulletin board. From the outset, he admired John’s immense reserve of raw talent and knew that for all his friend’s abrasiveness, cynicism, disruptive behavior, outrageousness, and general apathy toward art, there was something wildly inventive that would eventually take root. “John had a fantastic imagination that enabled him to see things for what they really were,” Harry recalls, “and then jumble them up in a hilarious, thought-provoking way. With a little luck, [I hoped] it would rub off on all of us.”

  Harry immediately attached himself to John and drew him into an inner circle of students with artistic and intellectual aspirations. The most appealing among them, both for his mordant wit and precocious ability with a paintbrush, was an elfin, delicately handsome boy named Stuart Sutcliffe. A year older than John, Sutcliffe had a “marvelous art portfolio” by the age of fourteen and was already “a really talented, serious painter, one of the stars at the art college.” Unlike most of his classmates, he had no Scouse accent, having been born in Edinburgh and raised there on and off since childhood; nevertheless, he qualified for an art school scholarship by having lived near enough to Liverpool while his father, Charles, a navy officer, was at sea. Stuart, like John, had been shaped by a household of women and emotional disarray. “More often than not, our father was abroad,” recalled Sutcliffe’s sister Pauline. On those rare occasions when home, he’d take Stuart and his roommate, Rod Murray, to the pub “for a real good booze-up,” after which he’d slip Stuart ten quid. “Then they wouldn’t see each other again for six months,” Pauline said. Their mother, Millie, worked full-time as a teacher, moonlighting as the local Labour Party officer, “which meant that Stuart was always in charge. He liked being the head of the household,” Pauline remembered. And despite the encumbrance of chores, as well as a steady babysitting job for novelist Beryl Bainbridge and her husband, Austin Davis, an art school don, he still immersed himself in painting and the pursuit of romantic mysticism.

  “Stuart was obsessed with Kierkegaard and mysticism,” Harry says. “And together we pored over those big mysterious questions: What does the future hold? What will happen to us? How can we extend the powers of the mind, expand our consciousness?” Like most art students, they glorified the existentialists—“not so much Sartre as Françoise Sagan”—and French cinema, spending hours camped out in the dark Continental Theatre in Birkenhead, where coffee was served between features of Bonjour Tristesse and Ashes and Diamonds.

  For John, the dreamy, pensive musings of Bill Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe were rich new sources to mine; but for laughs, which he craved, he turned to another art school misfit, Geoff Mohammed. If anyone was more conspicuous than John at the college, it was Mohammed, a hulking six foot three student of Indian and French-Italian extraction who drank, ranted, and blustered his way through classes without producing a scintilla of credible work. The product of a boarding school education, followed by a stint in the military police, Mohammed developed a passion for philosophy, palmistry, and jazz, the latter of which—not art—consumed his waking hours. John made no secret of the fact that he despised jazz, but he was nonetheless enamored of Geoff’s defense of it. Some years before, upon learning that Humphrey Lyttelton had forsaken traditional jazz for its modern counterpart, Geoff had waited for the renowned musician backstage one night after a show and dutifully punched him in the nose. “Geoff was very unconventional, with a magpie mind and attitude,” says Ann Mason, “and that made him quite unique in John’s eyes.” “They wanted to stand the system on its head,” recalls Helen Anderson, one of John’s classmates. “But, in truth, they were just fuckups.”

  The school instituted a “do as you please” policy, which meant that regular lectures, seminars, and workshops were scheduled but not entirely mandatory. Students worked at their own pace on a variety of projects that were presented to a tutor for evaluation every Friday afternoon. In every respect, John should have flourished in those circumstances. All those years spent under the thumb of Aunt Mimi and hostile masters, all those rules and requirements meant to stifle creativity, should have been enough to unleash his inspiration. And yet, ultimately, that was his undoing. Attitude and rebellion were essential to the creative process, but eventually he had to confront the essence of the college and produce a portfolio of art.

  For John, that couldn’t have been further from his reach. His lack of versatility, inexplicably overlooked by the school’s admissions officers, became a tremendous handicap. Recalled his friend and classmate Jonathan Hague: “John was absolutely untalented as far as serious art went. Part of the problem was that he was incredibly lazy… but he was also terribly out of his depth. He had to resit the lettering course, which was the most elementary of disciplines; he made a mockery of composition and was incapable of doing a serious perspective drawing. Clearly, he was mixed up. He wanted to do well, and yet he couldn’t.”

  Overwhelmed, John withdrew into a snug, sullen shell. “His paintings were always very thick, slapped-on things,” recalls Helen Anderson, who sat next to him in the third-floor classroom redolent of oil and turpentine. “He worked very quickly and got bored in no time. It was all scrub-scrub-scrub, then he’d walk away and have a smoke or start screaming his head off, acting the go
at, to make everybody around him laugh.” He focused almost singularly on drawing cartoons, “endless cartoons”—distinctive “troggy-type figures” and scribble-scrabble characteristic of the technique he’d acquired from Ivan Vaughan, which were dismissed by the faculty as infantile and pointless. But the cartoons confirmed a pattern of drafting skills that were on par with the best of his lettering classmates. Bill Harry has concluded that “he was an illustrator in the mold of [Saul] Steinberg, but no one was willing to develop his talent.”

  Things only worsened when Sutcliffe wandered into John’s life class, looking for an empty seat and easel where he could paint. Stuart was the genuine article; one only had to glance at his painting to be convinced of it. Formerly “besotted” with Cézanne and van Gogh, whose work he once emulated, Stuart had moved on—and tunneled in—experimenting with abstraction in order to develop a personal style that would carry him past the amateur level. According to Rod Murray, “he was painting like the American painters of the time—de Kooning and Rothko—although where they were nonfigurative, Stuart’s work was still based on images.” Helen Anderson recalls the material he turned out that year as being “very aggressive… with dark, moody colors, not at all the type of painting you’d expect from such a quiet fellow.” Stuart’s work made John feel more insecure than ever about his own skills. He tried woefully to overcome this reaction, but Stuart, whose determination and ambition were never well concealed, was a poster boy for the art college that John found so formidable. He had the glow, and it stung like hell.

  Nothing quite captured John’s outlook as succinctly as a scene Hague observed one afternoon in 1957, at a time when first-year students were expected to choose an area of concentration. “I remember John being dragged out of class into a passageway by a teacher in the metalwork department who was positively irate,” he says. The way Hague recalls it, the man was “grilling him for making no effort at all,” and John, hands dug securely into his pockets to avoid an impulsive response, was growing more distant by the moment. Slouching against the wall, he stared, unseeing, out the window, not really looking at anything but squarely off in some distant reverie, someplace silent, his own. The man lit into him unmercifully, chiding John, dredging up each shortcoming he’d observed, as though reading from a bill of particulars. Unable to stand it any longer, John lunged toward the teacher and exclaimed: “If you have to know, I don’t really want to be an artist—or have anything to do with art!” Absolutely flabbergasted, the man replied, “Well, what do you think you’ll end up doing?” glaring at this insolent young student as one would a deranged patient. John looked him straight in the eye and, with utter conviction, said, “I’m going to be a rock ’n roll singer.”

  [IV]

  Paul’s debut appearance with the Quarry Men—on October 18, 1957—was anything but auspicious. The band had been booked to entertain at a Conservative Club social held at New Clubmoor Hall, in the Norris Green section of Liverpool. Norris Green was considered “a posh neighborhood,” so to mark the event, John and Paul decided on “smartening up” their look. Says Colin Hanton: “They started talking about white jackets, the idea being that we [should] look like a group.” It sounded like a great idea; the band was all for it, a step up from “looking like a bunch of ragamuffins” onstage. But after some discussion, it was agreed that John and Paul would get the jackets, “creamy-colored, tweedy sportcoats,” subsidized by the rest of the band at the rate of “half a crown a week, collected by Nigel [Walley] until the bill was paid”; the rest would wear white shirts with tassels and black piping and black bootlace ties. Whether that decision was due to the expense of new jackets or the caliber of talent, no one is certain; however, it established Lennon and McCartney as partners and the band’s enduring front men.

  Determined to make an impression, Paul had been boning up for the gig, “practicing relentlessly,” according to a friend. For days before the show the boys tooled around Liverpool, chauffered by a well-to-do friend named Arthur Wong, in the flashy new Vauxhall he’d gotten for his seventeenth birthday. Everyone was “larking around”—smoking and wisecracking and howling at girls—except McCartney. Huddled with his guitar in the spacious backseat, oblivious to all the hijinks, Paul worked out the signature riff to “Raunchy,” an instrumental single by sax virtuoso Bill Justis that was burning up the radio. “Every damn minute, he would be picking at it until we threatened to toss him and the guitar out of the car,” recalls Charles Roberts, who had crawled decisively into the front seat to escape the torturous drone. It was unlikely that he’d finish it in time for the gig, and even less so that John would give him the opportunity for a solo. But Paul simply could not think of anything else.

  On that fateful evening, halfway through the show, John introduced the newest member of the band before launching into a version of “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” which showcased Paul’s deliberate pickwork. But when the time came for him to step out front, he suffered an attack of butterfingers, missing his cue. Then, trying to catch up to the rhythm section, he pecked haphazardly at the strings, hitting clam after clam until the whole arrangement caved in like a soufflé.

  “At first we were embarrassed,” says Colin Hanton, “just really uncomfortable with what had happened. John insisted on a certain degree of professionalism. And now the new guy made us look worse than the amateurs we were.”

  It was all Paul could do to slink back a few steps, in an attempt to disappear in the narrow space between Hanton and Len Garry. John, who took great personal pride in the Quarry Men, was momentarily startled. Normally, this provoked a dagger stare of disgust—or worse. “I thought he was going to lay into him something fierce,” Hanton says. But the pitiful sight of Paul cut right through his rancor. “Paul McCartney—normally so confident, so cocky, so graceful even ill at ease that you wanted to hate him—looked so deflated. Why, John laughed so hard, he almost pissed himself.”

  To the band’s surprise, the promoter invited them back to perform on other bills, both at New Clubmoor and Wilson Hall, in Garston. Garston was what the Woolton boys called a “no-go area,” a notoriously rough council estate near the docks where the Fyffe banana boats were unloaded, and Wilson Hall was its deepest, darkest site. “You could have your ass kicked there, just for having an ass,” says Mike Rice, a friend of John’s from Quarry Bank who accompanied the band on two dates toward the end of 1957. Rice recalls following the lads into the band room there, where promoter Charlie McBain (known as Charlie Mac) gave each of them a shilling—their first official fee—which they tucked into their shoes “so they could get out without being robbed.” Adding to Wilson Hall’s reputation was its status as a teddy boy hangout. The audience swaggered in there dressed to kill and dying to jive—followed by a good old-fashioned brawl at the slightest provocation. You could almost set your watch by it: invariably toward the end of each evening, after a particularly overheated song, a ring would expand around two rivals who had squared off and begun to snap. No one needed an excuse to swing on a mate, especially if he’d brought along a sand-filled sock for just the occasion, and rock ’n roll provided the perfect soundtrack, working the teds into a lather. “The bus station was literally across the street, and we knew the exact time the last number sixty-six left for Woolton,” recalls Eric Griffiths. “So one of us would stand watch, with the others lined up behind him. Then, with a half a minute to go, we’d make a run for it.”

  The gigs more than made up for the danger. The Quarry Men loved playing to those packed houses, willing to take their chances with the teds because they loved to entertain. They would finish a song, maybe play it over again, faster and looser for effect, then tear into the next one without waiting for applause. If things got hairy, with “blokes waiting for an excuse to thump” them, John would invariably lunge into some superfluous riff, distracting them until the situation calmed down.

  If the Quarry Men were inexperienced or self-conscious—as, by all means, they were—they gave no sign of it. They pushed ahe
ad, promoting themselves for dances as if the demand—and their reputation—warranted it. But there were better bands for any promoter who might be looking. Nigel Walley scoured the city for fresh venues, no matter how shabby or unprestigious the room, and chased down any source, including private parties, that presented live acts. Occasionally Charlie McBain would call, offering a weeknight at one of his dances, but aside from a few scattered dates, the Quarry Men were dormant through the end of the year.

  Although the band was stalled, it did nothing to brake the speed at which John and Paul’s relationship was developing. The two boys spent part of every day together, talking about music. Often, after school or on the errant day off, John would invite Paul back to his house, in Woolton, where they would hole up in the tiny front bedroom, smoking and playing records. Out from under Mimi’s watchful eye, they would sit cross-legged on the bed, running down bits of lyrics they’d memorized in an attempt to piece together an entire song, working a new chord into their slight repertoire. “We spent hours just listening to the stars we admired,” John recalled. “We’d sit round and look all intent and intense and then, when the record had ended, we [sic] try and reproduce the same sort of sounds for ourselves.” Paul’s pet expression for it—“just bashing away”—seems appropriate; they found ways to play songs using what little they knew about chord structure or technique. Other days they’d meet outside the art college and take the no. 86 bus together all the way out to Forthlin Road. During the week, while Jim was away selling cotton, they had the run of the house. Alone in the sun-filled living room—John on the chintz-covered sofa, and Paul curled into an easy chair at its side—they poured out all their big dreams: the kind of band they envisioned putting together, the musical possibilities that lay in store, the great possibilities if they worked. John talked, in fact, about playing serious gigs, even making records. Anyone eavesdropping might have written off these plans as teenage fantasies. Still, other teenagers had somehow pulled it off: Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry. Sure, they were all Americans, but that had to change sometime.