The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  They couldn’t have been prepared for what they found. The “studio” was even more primitive than they’d expected, “a tiny, tiny room with some basic recording equipment* shoved to one side” and a solitary microphone in the center. Percy Phillips, says Colin Hanton, “was a naffy old man, grumpy and excitable, who insisted we settle up the bill before setting up the equipment.” The five boys were prepared to kick in 3s. 6d. each to cover the cost quoted over the telephone. But as they now pooled their resources, Phillips mentioned a surcharge to transfer the song from tape to record.

  The plan had been to lay down a basic track, rebuilding it with as many retakes as was necessary to produce a flawless performance. But as Phillips performed a sound check, he explained that for the cut-rate price, he wasn’t putting them on tape; they’d “go straight to vinyl,” which meant any mistakes were permanent. This news troubled the band, which had only rehearsed one song, and even that still had its rough spots. Hastily, they tuned up and ran down the number, patching any holes as best they could, while Phillips struggled to get a level of some kind on Colin Hanton’s thunderous drums. When a solution was finally worked out—John, rather ingeniously, suggested draping Hanton’s scarf over the snare drum to dampen the vibration—they launched into “That’ll Be the Day” with the energy of a man chasing a train.

  Listening to the scratchy recording today, there is a clear sense of the band’s rush to perfection. From that opening legendary riff—a series of exacting triplets that George performed with flair, having transposed it to the B-string (unaware that Buddy Holly capoed his guitar on the seventh fret and began lower)—there is an energy, a roiling exuberance, that serves them obligingly throughout the song. The style is no longer Holly’s alone. There are still echoes of twangy rockabilly in the delivery, but the interplay of vocal jabs between Paul and John, who sings lead with complete, almost startling assuredness, shades the song’s buoyancy with an intensity unexplored in the original. John seemed to know intuitively how to grab a listener’s attention from the start, refusing to loosen his grip; the tension he invests in the lyric never falters. And the band is right in there behind him to provide ample support. All three guitars frame the performance in a sturdy, rhythmic groove, leading to a stylish instrumental break in which George and Duff Lowe trade the solo spotlight. For a shotgun, one-take, warts-and-all performance—let alone the band’s first dreamy foray into a recording studio—the Quarry Men managed to pull off a minor miracle.

  When they completed the song, Percy Phillips pressed them to continue without delay: kick off the next number. For a long moment, no one responded. “Then, out of the blue,” Hanton recalls, “Paul announced, ‘We’re going to do this new one we’ve written—“In Spite of All the Danger.” ’ I’d never even heard the damned song and was surprised they’d actually written something.” They begged for a minute to rehearse, but Phillips gruffly refused. “For seventeen and six you’re not here all day,” he snapped from his post behind the tape recorder, reminding them again of their frugality. “Just follow us,” John advised Lowe and Hanton, who were duly perplexed.

  Incredibly, the band managed to hang in there, considering its total lack of preparation, with Lowe and Hanton busking along nimbly in the background.

  Overall, the Quarry Men were satisfied with the results. Their first recording session was an unalloyed triumph, a dynamic, irresistible record. Except for the hastily patched-together B-side, John, Paul, and George, et al. had accomplished the improbable: they had made a record that resonates with energy and confidence. The boys were understandably ecstatic. Percy Phillips handed them their trophy, a superfragile ten-inch shellac disc, on whose label Paul scrawled both titles and the applicable songwriting credits, after which they immediately hit the street, drunk on the exhilaration of their accomplishment.

  “When we got the record, the agreement was we would have it for a week each,” Paul recalled. John, Paul, and George primarily entertained their friends with it; anyone who inquired was permitted to take it home for a day or two. (Considered “the rarest record in the world,” it was rediscovered by Duff Lowe in 1981 and sold to Paul McCartney for an undisclosed sum.) When it fell into Colin Hanton’s hands he passed it on to his friend Charles Roberts, who worked at Littlewood’s, the big football “pools” firm in the city center. “Charlie got it played daily, over the P.A. system in the staff canteen,” Hanton recalls, “but apparently there were mixed feelings about it [there].”

  But the desire to record was more a by-product of circumstance than a consuming passion. Performing—playing rock ’n roll—was their true love, but Nigel Walley recalls that “week after week went by without gigs, and the band really suffered by it.” Occasionally they were asked to entertain at private parties, but that wasn’t the same; by Paul’s own admission, it wasn’t much fun without a proper audience. “Girls were always there at our gigs,” recalls Colin Hanton. “Even in those days we signed plenty of autographs, many of them on thighs.”

  That certainly would not have occurred at the one gig of any significance they played that June, a dinner dance at St. Barnabas Hall—Barney’s, the scene of so many Woolton youth dances—in Penny Lane. It was inevitable that Julia would turn up. John had desperately wanted her to hear the band for some time, but stalled until a real gig made it seem more attractive. And now, here she was at last, in a dazzling scarlet dress and “with a smile that lit up the room,” standing alongside Barb Baker. Though tainted by the past, John and Julia had gravitated naturally toward each other and at this point in their lives welcomed the closeness that, by all accounts, they’d missed out on earlier. Now in her mid-forties, Julia finally had the wherewithal—the ability and enthusiasm, as well as the influence—to counsel her son, and she provided the perfect ear for John’s mounting anxieties. The two spent long hours together discussing everything from school to music, subjects Mimi opined upon with inflexible certainty. For all her perceived inadequacies, Julia had a wonderful sense of dealing with teenagers.

  That unseasonably warm night, the hall was filled with members of a local scooter club celebrating their annual race. Despite the otherwise private event, no one seemed put out by the arrival of two uninvited guests, especially two attractive, radiant women who, in their exalted intimacy, might have passed for mother and daughter. There was plenty of room along the edges for them to stand back and observe the show. Julia was “absolutely overwhelmed” by the sight of John cutting loose on the platform stage, a guest remembers. “She couldn’t stop moving” to the music. Her entire body responded to the tempo: the points of her hips swaying in gentle seesaw waves, shoulders rocking, weight switching foot to foot. “Between numbers she was the only person who clapped every time—and loud,” Colin Hanton recalls. “If that didn’t get things going, she put her fingers in her teeth and whistled. She probably liked us just fine, but she would have done anything to encourage John.”

  Coming to the gig had been a test of sorts for Julia. She’d seemed genuinely proud of John and thrilled by his band. It was one thing to sit there politely, another thing entirely to dance and cheer like one of the gang.

  And it was all the more poignant, considering she’d never see them again.

  [II]

  For Mimi Smith, Julia’s visit to the Quarry Men gig was yet further proof of her sister’s irresponsibility. Imagine sanctioning such foolishness! It was just as Mimi thought: nothing had changed since the day, almost two decades earlier, when Julia ran off with Freddie Lennon. That girl was still governed by her impulses.

  Presumably, Julia described the performance for Mimi in blinding detail over tea the next afternoon. The sisters rarely missed an opportunity to spend time together each day. There was always a tug-of-war over some issue concerning John’s welfare, which invariably ended with Mimi “laying down the law.” Frustrated and resentful of this, Julia waged a constant battle for Mimi’s approval. She implored her elder sister to make peace with Bobby Dykins. After all, he had long demon
strated that he was a decent man. It went without saying that he earned a good, honest living; no longer employed solely as a waiter, he also managed several bars around the Liverpool area and contributed generously to the family so that Julia didn’t need to work. As John’s cousin Stanley Parkes observed, “He was always very open and cheerful and seemed quite happy to me. [A]nd he gave Julia a good life.” For all that, Mimi refused to give an inch.

  Despite the sensitive situation, Julia and Mimi were unfailingly loyal to each other, and whatever the tension over John, tea at Menlove Avenue was a ritual not to be broken. Usually the sisters sat at a table in Mimi’s morning room, off the kitchen, but in warmer weather they often stood in the garden and talked, sometimes lingering into the early evening. It was there that Nigel Walley found them on July 15, 1958, chatting across the garden gate. “I’d gone around to John’s house to call for him,” Walley remembers. “It was a beautiful summer night, just getting dark, and I thought maybe we’d do something together. But as it turned out, he was off staying at Julia’s. In fact, she was in the process of leaving Mimi’s to rejoin him.” Gracious to a fault, Julia invited Nigel to ride along home with her, but that didn’t appeal to Walley, who offered to walk her as far as the bus stop, farther down Menlove Avenue. Standing together on the sidewalk, invigorated by the delicious night air, Julia dallied, cracking joke after joke with the rhythm of a Liverpool comic. Finally, about 9:30, after the last glimmer of light had disappeared, Julia and Nigel headed toward the bus. As they got to the intersection at Vale Road, Nigel waved good night and turned toward home.

  Julia decided to cross Menlove Avenue in the middle of the block. The road widened beyond that point, with two lanes of traffic on each side, separated by an old tram track thickened with hedges. When Nigel was partway up Vale Road he turned back momentarily to watch Julia dart across two lanes and disappear into the hedge. Afterward, he continued on his way. Not “five seconds later,” he heard a hideous thud, followed by the screech of tires and “saw her body flying through the air.” For a split second, the whole world froze. The only movement in the scene was Julia’s ghostly arc, backlit by lamplight. Nigel, whose eyes followed her slow-motion trajectory in disbelief, tried to scream but “couldn’t get a sound out.” He felt a rush of terror. Then suddenly everything came unstuck. It wasn’t until he saw her land, “almost a hundred feet from where she was hit,” that he started running toward the accident.

  It was clear, when Nigel finally reached Julia, what had happened. “The camber of the road runs into the hedge, right where she reemerged,” he says. “If a car hugs too close… you can’t see it, and vice versa.” Nigel himself had been in countless cars that edged cautiously into the outer lane when rounding that curve. Julia, he knew, wasn’t oblivious to the danger it presented, but she must have been preoccupied. An off-duty policeman, rocketing around the innocent-looking curve, hit her head-on, the right front bumper of his car flinging her skyward, like a football. It was also clear to Walley that Julia’s injuries were critical. “She wasn’t moving,” he recalls. “I ran back to get Mimi, and we rushed to wait for the ambulance.” Julia’s elder sister bent mournfully over her body, “white with terror, and crying in hysterics.”

  It was just after eleven o’clock when the patrol car pulled up in front of 1 Blomfield Road. A policeman stood stiffly on the front step, his face frozen with the look of a naughty schoolboy. John and Bobby Dykins answered the door. When they heard the news, John recalled, “we both went white.” Not wasting a minute, they took a taxi to Sefton General, the hospital where Julia had been taken by the ambulance, but John refused to view her body. Devastated, gripped by a suffocating melancholy, he waited in the reception area while a grief-stricken Dykins made the identification. Thoughts of the past, of his father, absent and inaccessible, mingled with thoughts of the present and future. Aside from Mimi, he was really on his own this time. “That’s really fucked everything!” he thought. “I’ve no responsibility to anyone now.”

  Later that night John wandered over to Barbara Baker’s house, where he had been persona non grata since the recent disclosure of their affair had resulted in Baker’s parents’ ending the relationship. Sensing his desperation, she defied her parents and went for a walk with him. “He didn’t say anything,” she remembered, as they strolled through Reynolds Park. “I didn’t know [Julia had died]. He didn’t tell me. We just walked and walked.” It seemed odd, she thought after a while, that he didn’t try to kiss her. It had been several days since they’d been alone; their impulse, when that much time had elapsed, was usually driven by desire. He seemed “physically ill.” Finally, John just broke down, his body heaving uncontrollably. Barbara held him tenderly, and through a hail of tears it all came pouring out—about the accident, his heartbreak, the terror of outright abandonment. “We walked until well after midnight,” Baker said, until she felt he was well enough to go home. But as he moped away, alone, down the dark ribbon of road, she knew that John Lennon had been changed forever.

  It would seem logical that he’d bury his sorrow in the band. “Now we were both in this, both losing our mothers,” Paul later wrote. “This was a bond for us, something of ours, a special thing.”

  In a way, Paul was right. From that day onward, he and John must have formed a mutual, unspoken acknowledgment couched in their respective sadness. Already bound by music, they were connected in more intimate, complicated ways. Neither boy was inclined to explore these emotions, and John, especially, was hard-set in denial. While he struggled with limited success to cope with his mother’s death, he refused to discuss it with Paul or, for that matter, anyone else. Nigel Walley, cruelly traumatized by the accident and struggling to make sense of it on his own, was rebuffed by John in repeated attempts to discuss what had happened. “For months [afterward], John refused to speak to me,” Walley says. “Inwardly, he was blaming me for the death. You know: ‘if Nige hadn’t walked her to the bus stop’ or ‘if he’d have kept her [occupied] another five minutes, it never would have happened.’ Even Pete Shotton couldn’t engage John on the subject, drawing only a mumbled response when he offered condolences. There was something trusting, something innocent that “went out of him forever,” Shotton realized. As far as Pete was concerned, John and Julia had enjoyed “a girlfriend-boyfriend relationship. She was his buddy… not his mother.” Though their attraction was expressly platonic, John, in essence, had lost “a mate.”

  For all his nurturing, Paul couldn’t fill the void. John wasn’t ready to accept any kind of social comforting. As John was to later remark: “I lost [my mother] twice. Once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie. And once again at fifteen [sic] when she actually, physically died.” He had never felt more detached in his life, or with more need for some reinforcement. And yet, though Paul was prepared to strengthen their intimacy as friends, John wanted no part of it. He wanted to be angry for a while.

  Dejected and resentful, John passed the remainder of the summer largely in solitude. For the first time in several years, he didn’t go to visit his cousin Stanley in Scotland. Instead, he sulked in his room at Menlove Avenue, refusing to see visitors. When friends showed up unannounced, Mimi met them at the door with a disapproving glare and turned them away. Even Paul and George saw little of their bandleader, and on the few occasions when they lured him out to practice, there was no real enthusiasm. Songwriting especially became a struggle. The five or six tunes he and Paul managed to finish were bright, upbeat, and romantic—hardly reflective of John’s dark mood, and there is no doubt as to who was chiefly responsible for them. Neither boy ever claimed there was parity in producing their material, or pretended otherwise. In the course of their extraordinary collaboration, John and Paul routinely worked alone on songs before putting their heads together. In this case, Paul provided the basic structure for “Love Me Do,” a catchy and direct, albeit innocuous, song whose plodding lyric does nothing to revive the melody’s stunted hook. The writing has few of the
stylized nuances—the elliptical rhythmic twists and inflections—that give contour to their later songs. Paul had tinkered with “Love Me Do” for some time before bringing it respectfully to John for a polish, but it never evinced the spirit that a studio production ultimately gave it. As for “P.S. I Love You,” with its playful admission of vulnerability, Paul noted: “It was pretty much mine. I don’t think John had much of a hand in it.”

  When school started again, there was a noticeable shift in the group’s balance. Creatively, physically, emotionally, John was coming apart at the seams. He had begun drinking heavily, as though determined to drown his anguish in self-abuse. Night after night, in a room at Ye Cracke, he downed beer and whiskey until he could barely stand. Straddling a low-backed chair, he plunged into soul-searching conversations with strangers, punctuating them with explosions of anxious rage. Most nights, John was “very entertaining… inclined to talk about the bum of a girl or tell funny stories about somebody sitting across the room.” But he could very quickly turn nasty. Boundaries were drawn and redrawn without any warning. If old friends stopped by the pub, they avoided him because, sometimes, John seemed determined to drive them away, determined to abandon them as his mother had abandoned him. On one occasion, barely sober, John began egging on “some blokes… prancing about, doing ballet steps” in front of the old police station on Renshaw Street, when he finally pushed the wrong button and they “butted him in the face.” Another time, undoubtedly drunk, he picked an unanticipated fight with his dear art school mate Jonathan Hague, for whom he had nothing but the fondest feelings. “He got my duffel coat up over my head and started flailing away,” Hague remembers. “It actually didn’t mean a thing to me; I was too drunk. But the next day in school, in a very shaky, frightened way, John told me that he was trying to kill the person under the coat and didn’t understand the anger in him to do such a thing.”