The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  The front room was blindingly dark. The only way anyone could tell Caldwell was performing was by the sound of his Hofner Senator washing out of a distant corner. It took a few minutes before George found the Quarry Men, with Nigel Walley in tow, standing in the doorway to the half-empty back room. Paul made introductions, then stood back to watch how things developed. The other lads treated him indifferently at first, especially John Lennon, who seemed to look right through George. “He was a very tiny teddy boy,” says Hanton, “just a schoolkid, without much to say.” Finally, Paul steered everyone into the back room, where it was determined that George would play.

  With very little prompting, George launched into “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” the signature tune of British dance-band virtuoso Burt Weedon, which he’d copied in exquisite detail from a record. “The lads were very impressed,” recalls Eric Griffiths, for whom playing a piece like that was inconceivable. It was an elaborate song that demanded more than a bit of fancy fretwork, and George played it “right the way through,” with élan, like a trouper. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Colin Hanton. “He played the guitar brilliantly—better than any of us handled an instrument—so I had no hang-up about inviting him to come around.”

  Maybe Hanton didn’t, but John did. He wanted nothing to do with a mere schoolboy and told Paul so. Not one to be denied easily, Paul went into action, engineering another “chance” meeting between John and George in, of all places, the empty upper deck of a Liverpool bus. Once again, George had his guitar in tow, and this time he zipped, albeit “nervously,” through a credible rendition of “Raunchy.” Beaming like a shrewd politician, Paul knew he had won his argument.

  Still, George’s age was almost “too much” for John to get past, “Raunchy” or no “Raunchy.” John admitted as much, saying, “George was just too young…. [He] looked even younger than Paul, and Paul looked about ten, with his baby face.” That wasn’t the image John wanted to project. But George was, in fact, the best musician up for grabs that John had come across, and ultimately that made Harrison irresistible. John had worked very hard picking sidemen for the Quarry Men who best showed off his talent. In no other area were his energy and willingness to do whatever was necessary to achieve a goal more evident. He’d landed the rare-as-sugar drummer, exiled his inadequate best friend, and recruited Paul McCartney, thus relinquishing some of the spotlight he’d monopolized up to now. In that sense, George Harrison was like catnip.

  As for George, he felt liberated. He’d been doing his musical homework without any real payoff, no outlet in which to show what he could do; this was a chance to work with some dedicated players who shared his aims and interests. To join up with his grammar-school mentor had been a godsend, and now a character like John, as well—it was almost too good to believe. George later said, “I don’t know what I felt about him when I first met him; I just thought he was O.K.” But Arthur Kelly disagrees. “George idolized John from the outset,” Kelly says. “We all did. He was one of those guys you couldn’t take your eyes off. It was a combination of everything: his sense of humor, his attitude, the way he dressed. Even if he sat there saying nothing, you felt drawn to him.” Together, John and Paul were pure magnetism; they had everything George wanted. Says Kelly, “When he met Paul and John, they were the missing links.”

  Not everyone in the band, however, felt as comfortable with the new configuration. Everyone knew that John had his heart set on a three-man guitar front line; in terms of skill alone, the lineup was clear. An initial rehearsal attended by George put it right under Eric Griffiths’s nose. A quiet, sensitive boy to begin with, Griff “took it badly.” Afterward, he cornered Colin Hanton and expressed his uneasiness. Hanton, in his own right, wasn’t blind to it. “I said to him, ‘Don’t feel so bad, I’m only on borrowed time, too,’ ” Colin recalls. “John and Paul were getting too serious about the band. Eventually they’d decide that the drummer just wasn’t up to it.”

  John and Paul eventually forced the issue. One Saturday afternoon a rehearsal was hastily called at Paul’s house, made unprecedented by Griff’s conspicuous absence. They simply hadn’t told him about it. “It was an awful situation,” Hanton admits. Forty years later, he still feels the flush of betrayal. And that wasn’t the end of it. Coincidentally, Griff telephoned Paul’s house while the Quarry Men were running down a number. “And they made me deal with it, then and there,” Hanton recalls. “John and Paul refused to acknowledge the situation.” They stayed in another room, “tinker[ing] on their guitars,” removing themselves from the fray.

  Rather than participate in the fallout, Griff honorably walked away. He’d had enough of a taste of show business, enough of a friendship riven by ambition. And, his standards being very simple, he had enough sense to know when to quit.

  A similar fate would have befallen Len Garry had he not contracted tubercular meningitis. Confined to a ward in Fazakerley Hospital for seven months, he simply drifted away from the others—out of sight, out of mind.

  Normally, as a band loses members, it snowballs into decline. But with the Quarry Men, just the opposite happened. The group, pared down to its core musicians, got very tight. Where before they had lacked a vision—a way of playing songs that brought their literal interpretations to life—there was now an unmuzzled sense of creativity. Fragments of individual passages clicked into place. Rehearsals took on a more practical imperative. The three future Beatles spent time retooling jagged arrangements, using what each boy brought to the equation, so that the songs acquired tension and excitement. To one observer, “it was like cracking code.” Three guitarists playing with a more concentrated focus succeeded in brightening and clarifying what had been the group’s increasingly shapeless sound. Old songs that had vibrated with too many possibilities evolved exponentially, with new resonance, new exuberance.

  The new, improved Quarry Men reveled in the possibilities. John, Paul, George—and Colin. They were almost there.

  Chapter 7 A Good Little Sideshow

  [I]

  For almost a year after George Harrison joined the Quarry Men, living rooms and backyards were, in general, the only venues where the band played gigs. Though local dance halls and “jive hives” actively booked acts to fill the huge demand for live music, they showed little, if any, interest in hiring the boys.

  The neglect stemmed from a conventional reflex that went beyond mere talent itself. Despite the shift in influence from skiffle to rock ’n roll, Liverpool still served the forces of vaudeville, and for old-school promoters who governed the scene, its proprieties could not be shouldered aside. Never mind the crazy, foolish-sounding music—that they could abide. But disrespect for the past—never. They expected the type of slick, showbiz professionalism that had graced stage shows for sixty years, and anything less, any loss of respect, would not be tolerated whatsoever. Of course, this thinking ran contrary to the whole aesthetic of rock ’n roll. The beauty of the music was that it so rudely flouted tradition. Perhaps rock critic Lester Bangs put it best when he suggested that rock was “nothing but a Wham-O toy to bash around as you please in the nursery.” It sent up the whole feeble showbiz establishment in a way that was guaranteed to offend the old-timers who worshipped it. In Liverpool, the network of promoters—Brian Kelly, Charlie McBain, Vic Anton, Bill Marsden, Ralph Webster, and Doug Martin, among others—accepted the shift away from more traditional music, but only on their terms, which meant that the beat groups they hired maintained a certain stodgy decorum. Most wore matching suits, played a polished set of songs mixed with corny patter, and behaved themselves like perfect gentlemen.

  All of which eluded the Quarry Men.

  “John refused to behave like a trained monkey,” says Nigel Walley. “He’d take a gig seriously, show up on time, and [be] ready to play, but as for someone’s idea of proper behavior, he was having none of it.” John wouldn’t kowtow to promoters who insisted that the band present a hokey stage show. Requests to “tone down the volume” were routinely
ignored.

  And there were too many other acts who were willing to play by the rules. The same names kept cropping up wherever Nigel tried to land a gig. The Swinging Bluegenes blended jazz and traditional blues into a silky smooth, if innocuous, confection that went down with relative ease. The same with the Mars Bars, fronted by a Scouse sprite named Gerry Marsden, whose twinkly, eager-to-please stage persona reminded many spectators of a docile marionette and whose show packed all the punch of a pub sing-along. Slightly harder-edged, but no less parochial, were the James Boys, who later, as Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, became the resident, or house, band at St. Luke’s Hall, in the suburb of Crosby. Eddie Miles, arguably the best guitarist in Liverpool, launched Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares (with his next-door neighbor, a teenager named Richard Starkey) to showcase a “down-home” style session. Cass and the Cassanovas appeared regularly in a “student joint” called the Corinthian, where Brian Casser, “an assertive, all-around showman” with a sweet, toothy image, played the type of tame set that required his drummer to use brushes. And Al Caldwell’s Raging Texans, unconvincing as teenage rebels, mined the same rank showmanship that established them a year later as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. These bands, which became the vanguard of the Merseybeat phenomenon, along with the Two Jays, the Hi Tones, and half a dozen other beat groups, developed faster, rocked respectfully, and toed the line.

  Frustrated by the band’s slow progress, John and Paul concentrated on practicing together every spare moment they got—and lit upon a momentous discovery. Paul, as it happened, mentioned casually that he’d written several songs, and he played John an early effort called “I Lost My Little Girl.” The song is an achingly simplistic romantic ballad from the perspective of an uninitiated fourteen-year-old; nevertheless, John was, in Pete Shotton’s estimation, “floored.”* It is difficult to imagine that writing songs had never occurred to John, although he may have assumed that the effort was beyond him; or it is possible he just never gave it a whirl. There was little precedent for it among British teenagers. At any rate, Paul’s disclosure set the current flowing and is arguably a pivotal event in modern musical history.

  A few years later, people who toured with the Beatles related countless stories about watching John and Paul bang out songs together on a crowded bus or a plane or a van or in the throes of backstage chaos—they could write anywhere and were apparently unself-conscious about it—but by that time the formula was ingrained; they were cranking them out like piecework.

  In the spring of 1958, John and Paul exorcised the music that was heard—and shared—in their heads. It was a burst of pure, unconscious energy, and despite all later efforts to perpetuate it, the urgency was no longer there. As John so archly put it: “You can’t be that hungry twice.” They had all the tools right at hand: innocence, enthusiasm, desire, opportunity. Between them there was no shortage of imagination or energy. If they lacked anything, it was technique, the musical skills necessary to bring the kind of intricate, unconventional, even intellectual touches to their songs that marked their later work. Their talent was so natural, so unforced and kinetic, that it developed like infant speech. Perhaps they didn’t understand it themselves.

  That spring John and Paul gorged themselves on a bumper crop of fresh material, experimenting with lyrical harmonies and a panoply of vocal styles served by their natural abilities. Most of the treatments they tackled were copied faithfully from American records, down to the last marginal lick. Later John urged fans away from such crutches, admonishing them, “Don’t copy the swimming teacher, learn how to swim,” but for the time being, imitation prevailed as they jumped from one influence to another, casting around for an identity.

  Initially there was an almost obsessive preoccupation with the Everly Brothers, whom the boys adopted as their “idols.” They careened from one Everly hit to the next—“Cathy’s Clown,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “So How Come (No One Loves Me)”—including, as Paul noted, “even some of the B sides like ‘So Sad (to Watch Good Love Go Bad).’ ” Their parts were custom-made for impersonation. “I’d be Phil and John would be Don,” he explained, recalling the flights of fantasy in which they performed the songs with exaggerated emotion, trying their best to imitate the brothers’ downy harmonies.

  Eventually they gravitated to Buddy Holly, whose cadences bore a twangy, albeit double-tracked, similarity. After being sacked from the Quarry Men, Griff had enlisted in the merchant marine, shipping out immediately to ports in South America and Canada. “That’s where I picked up Buddy Holly,” Griffiths says. “I brought his records back to Liverpool [along with Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”], and John and Paul would either buy them off me, or we’d swap.” The attraction wasn’t hard to fathom. Buddy Holly had everything they wanted, everything they’d been struggling to create musically: melodic songs; a crisp, clean sound; impeccable rhythm; unforgettable riffs; and monster appeal. His entire image was suffused with the dreamy romanticism of a small-town success story. Only twenty-two, he conveyed an Everyman presence, with his birdlike face, unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses, and a gawkiness at odds with rock ’n roll stardom. When he sang, his clear, slightly nasal alto, with a hint of the Deep South, carried a message of determination. One song, in particular—“Listen to Me”—presented an enormous challenge. “We sat around for an entire afternoon trying to decipher the lyric,” recalls Arthur Kelly. “No one could figure out the line ‘I will love you tenderly,’ because [Holly] phrased it so awkwardly. It drove John nuts: ‘What is it? What is it?’ They went through every possible rhyme, matching it to the previous line, before hitting on the proper word.” Eventually, after putting it all together, they worked up a neat little arrangement to go with the rest of Holly’s vibrant repertoire.

  More germane to their discovery of Buddy Holly was that he wrote his own songs. “People these days take it for granted that you do,” Paul recalled, “but nobody used to then.” It reinforced the capricious experiment that they’d heretofore only tiptoed around with trepidation. Buddy Holly gave them sanction—and courage. He was the whole rock ’n roll package. For John and Paul, this hit like an explosion. “John and I started to write because of Buddy Holly,” said Paul.

  [II]

  By March 1958, songs were pouring out at an extraordinary rate. The McCartney parlor, conveniently deserted during weekdays, played host to a revolving cast of layabouts sagging off school, its frost-rimed windows pooled with condensation from the rising body heat, the wallpapered room, which was too small for the turnout, engulfed in a purple cloud of cigarette smoke. Guitars rested against the coffee table, sandwich wrappers and cups lay balled up on its surface, creating an impression that the place had been vandalized. Framed within this tableau were John and Paul, their hunched figures posed in profile on the couch—“playing into each other’s noses,” as John often described it—sifting through papers and notebooks fanned out on the seat cushion between them. “We kept the record player going a lot of the time, playing the latest American hits.” They would begin by scrawling, “A Lennon-McCartney Original,” at the top of a blank, blue-lined page, then jotting down “anything [they] came up with”—words, images, or fragments of lyrics that corresponded to one of the protean melodies that bounced back and forth like a beach ball until it was resolved. Gradually, a verse would take shape, then another; verses would get linked to a refrain, with rejected phrases blacked out or reworked, and substitutes annotated in the margins to fit a particular meter. It was an indefinite, unpredictable process; there was nothing sophisticated about it—no method to speak of, aside from studying other songs—just a general notion of where something was headed. A large measure of luck factored into it. And even then they regarded the outcome perfunctorily, like driftwood that had washed up onshore. As John recalled, “We were just writing songs a la [the] Everly Brothers, a la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no
more thought to them than that—to create a sound.” Constructing a great hook was their chief goal, something sly and memorable. “Lyrics didn’t really count as long as we had some vague theme: ‘She loves you, he loves her, and they love each other.’ ”

  From the beginning, John tapped right into the approach that Paul first experimented with. Clearly, it presented no struggle for him. He had an innate feel for songwriting, a talent for turning a phrase inside out until it squealed. “It was great,” Paul recalled, “because instead of looking into my own mind for a song, I could see John playing—as if he was holding a mirror to what I was doing.”

  But like all scientific processes, the payoffs were inconsistent. Their first collaborative efforts—“Too Bad About Sorrows” and “Just Fun”—lacked intensity. Burdened by lazy moon/June rhymes, there wasn’t enough to rescue either song. “In Spite of All the Danger,” a sloppy doo-wop treatment that stands as the first original tune they recorded (although it wasn’t released until 1996), and “Like Dreamers Do,” another misfire that eventually earned a cover,* were shelved for lack of enthusiasm. The first songs that showed some promise were “One After 909” and “I Call Your Name,” the latter of which they wrote in April while camped out in John’s bedroom.

  “One After 909” is as simple and straightforward as any song they ever wrote, and surprisingly durable for its economy. Built on a standard three-chord progression, it owes plenty to the early Chuck Berry hits, especially “Maybelline,” with a chunky R&B vamp, thumping bass, and country-type licks woven into the breaks. The lyric bristles with an emotional uneasiness, full of the unfocused, adolescent frustrations a guy experiences when attempting to hook up with his girl. But unlike the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl scenario, this one is ill fated from the start. He is certain what train she is traveling on—she’s told him “the one after 909”—but to no avail. When he turns up at the station to meet her, even the location is wrong. The song had all the potential for whiny self-pity, but instead of its being cast as a lovesick plaint, an unexpected bitterness churns below the surface—“Move over once, move over twice / C’mon, baby, don’t be cold as ice”—an early glimpse into John and Paul’s narrative finesse.