With regular retelling, it became easy to underestimate the hurricane force of this primary experience. “Come Go with Me” wasn’t merely a song they both knew, it was a song few knew; it was hidden gold, a shared secret, a connector of connoisseurs. John didn’t have the Dell-Vikings’ record and nor did Paul; they both knew it only from listening in record-shop booths or from its occasional airplay on Decca’s Luxembourg shows. John didn’t know it enough to have learned the words, Paul only knew it enough to know the words John was singing weren’t the real ones.
Frequently asked what he thought of John Lennon this first time he saw him, Paul McCartney inevitably came to develop a pat response, what he would call “a cute story,” rounding it off, giving it a nice ring. The truth was deeper. “My [real] first impression was that it was amazing how he was making up the words. He was singing ‘Come Go with Me’ by the Dell-Vikings and he didn’t know one of the words. He was making up every one as he went along. I thought it was great.”3
On stage at about 4:15, the Quarry Men’s set probably lasted half an hour. A Liverpool Weekly News reporter, who took their names and some background details for the following week’s front-page report, wrote that they performed “Cumberland Gap,” “Maggie May” and “Railroad Bill” (yet another traditional American train song popularized in Britain by Lonnie Donegan); others present have added to that list “Rock Island Line,” “Lost John,” “Putting on the Style” and “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie.” When John sang “Putting on the Style” in place of the line “it’s only our poor preacher, boys, putting on the style” he substituted “it’s only Mr. Pryce-Jones, putting on the style”—a cheeky name-check of the vicar of St. Peter’s. Another song John messed about with was the Vipers’ latest single, “Streamline Train,” which he decided should be called “Long Black Train.” That was the skiffle element. It isn’t remembered which rock songs they played but there would have been at least a couple of Elvis numbers and, as well as “Come Go with Me,” John would recall singing “Be-Bop-A-Lula” here because it was the first time he performed Gene Vincent’s song.
With good fortune, Woolton boy Geoff Rhind was at the fete and had brought his camera, and as a schoolfriend of four of the Quarry Men (John, Pete, Eric and Rod) he took their photo. It was just one shot but it was perfect, destined to be reproduced in thousands of publications, the definitive photo of the group’s first phase, taken the very day John Lennon met Paul McCartney. Paul isn’t in it, and the crowd gathered around the small stage, some of them on the stage, are young children. John is looking straight into Rhind’s lens, right hand strumming the Gallotone so vigorously it’s a blur; there’s the checked shirt bought by Julia, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his hair is a messy tousled quiff, and he’s singing into the one microphone supplied as PA while five other Quarry Men beat out the rhythm.
Ten years later, John would recall “I seemed to disgust everybody that day,” but didn’t explain why, beyond saying that Mimi was appalled he’d finally gone all out and dressed as a Teddy Boy—which the photo clearly disproves.4 She was at the fete along with other family members, passing close by husband George’s grave as she walked through the church grounds.
Ivan Vaughan had known John since infancy. In some ways they were markedly different characters, especially in the way they applied themselves at school, but Ivan admired his gangleader’s many talents and paid full respect. Introducing other people to John was a role he carried out with care: only “great fellows” would do. One was Len Garry, who’d been accepted into both the gang and the Quarry Men; and now there was another “great fellow” for John to meet. After the group’s first set, John wandered across to the scout hut to leave his guitar safe for a while, and it was here that Ivan introduced him to his schoolmate Paul McCartney. There wouldn’t have been a handshake and there wasn’t much talk; Pete Shotton, never far from John’s side, says Paul was quiet and remembers a certain wariness—“they were almost standoffish”—but then this wasn’t meant to be a summit encounter or a meeting of like minds, it was just lads standing around gassing, probably about music or birds.5 Paul felt self-conscious about his age: like Ivan, he’d turned 15 only three weeks earlier, whereas John was clearly much older, well on his way to 17—a veritable chasm, boy to man. “I was just the wrong side of the cusp and they were just the right side of it. That’s the way I remember feeling.”6 Paul also realized he’d seen John Lennon before. “I saw him a few times before I met him—‘Oh he’s that feller, the Ted who gets on the bus.’ You notice who’s hip … I wouldn’t look at him too hard [on the bus] in case he hit me.”*
The fete carried on while the lads tootled around, perspiring in the humid eighty-degree heat. Over here a crowd was enjoying a demonstration of obedience and obstacle training by Liverpool City Police dogs; over there children queued for rides on a toy car worked by the Boy Scouts. Hydrogen-filled balloons were released from the church field with a prize offered to the person whose balloon traveled farthest, there were three fancy-dress competitions for the kiddies, the brass band played, and there was the assortment of sideshows and stalls typical of any rural British fete, of which this—despite the events happening off to the side—was just another, no more, no less.
According to the program, the Quarry Men had to play a further stage spot, probably for half an hour from 5:45 as the festivities were winding to a close, but no one can definitively remember if they played or not.
There was a fourth appearance of the day to come, but not until well after eight: they were booked as the small-print name at the church-hall dance over the road, the interval filler for the George Edwards Band, a small-unit dance band playing waltzes and foxtrots. So, there was now much hanging around. A couple of the Quarry Men went home for tea, but a cluster of boys—including John Lennon, Pete Shotton, Len Garry, Colin Hanton, Ivan Vaughan and Paul McCartney—kicked their heels inside the hall while it was being prepared for the dance. They hung around by the stage and also in a small anteroom to the left which had a piano.
As they lounged around, so the talk hit on music. Not one to hold himself back, Paul asked John for a go on his guitar, and noticing its strange banjo tuning suggested he could retune it. The way he held the instrument upside down prompted a few sniggers, but after a minute or two of fiddling Paul suddenly stopped and burst into “Twenty Flight Rock.” Here, right away, was talent, already way out of John’s league. And it wasn’t just that Paul could get through the song from start to finish, singing with a strong rocking voice and playing those chords with confidence, it was knowing all the words. “Twenty Flight Rock” was tricky … and it was another connoisseur’s piece. It hadn’t made the charts, so anyone who’d learned it had gone out of his way—an expedition made only by the passionate, not something you can fake.
After this, Paul went into full exhibition mode, showing off, confident of his ability and aware of his audience. He demonstrated one or two chords he thought the gathering might not have heard, and he played them some other numbers (“Be-Bop-A-Lula” was one, something by Elvis surely another). Then, showing real neck, he switched to piano and started belting out his Little Richard routine, yelling alone into the quiet of a cavernous church hall. Paul couldn’t have known it, but by slipping into “Long Tall Sally” he was sliding into John’s main artery. That constantly thrilling, screaming black voice of Little Richard Penniman was now coming out of Ivan’s little mate from Allerton. No matter how much John affected an air of coolness, his insides had to be leaping. Bulls-eye. Paul McCartney had impressed the guy on whom making an impression was suddenly so vital. He’d set out to do it and he’d achieved it; a tad eager but trying to hide it, his eyebrows raised, probably biting his lip, talking slightly too fast, switched on, and good. Really good. None of the Quarry Men could do anything like this.
Villagers ambled into the hall shortly before eight, men in suits and ties but short-sleeve shirts, ladies in summer dresses; and even more extraordinary than Geoff Rhind happen
ing to take their photo during the afternoon, the Quarry Men’s evening performance was recorded on a Grundig reel-to-reel tape machine heaved down the hill from his home on Kings Drive by a member of the Bible class and youth club, Bob Molyneux. He captured most of the music performed by both dance band and skiffle group, using several spools of tape, standing by the side of the stage with the recorder plugged into the mains and the microphone in his hand. If anyone noticed him then no one remembered it, and it wasn’t until 1994, thirty-seven years after the event, that Molyneux disclosed the astonishing fact, selling the sole surviving spool of Emitape (tape manufactured by EMI) that hadn’t been lost during intervening house moves. It includes two Quarry Men songs: the current chart number 1, “Putting on the Style,” and “Baby Let’s Play House”—John Lennon doing Elvis in front of the vicar. It’s by some distance his earliest known recording, and though the fidelity is poor, and the hall’s high-gabled ceiling swamps the sound in a booming echo, one can plainly hear John Lennon through the thud.
And this, even more than its highly improbable existence, is the most extraordinary thing about the tape: that it is unmistakably John Lennon. Although inspired by Elvis and Lonnie, he’s not attempting to imitate their voices or their style, and more strikingly still he’s not adopting any phoney American or mid-Atlantic accent. Singers always start off as impersonators, mimicking whoever made the record they’re performing, some perhaps going on to develop their own voice. That John Lennon already had it at Woolton, that he was so audibly himself, is the mark of a true original. Not only does he have a great rock voice, it’s an honest one. His voice is who he is.
It was all over by ten o’clock. Paul says he then went with Ivan, John, Pete and some others to a pub, the 15-year-olds trying their best to appear of drinking age, but then tripping into a panic when word somehow reached them that a local hard-knock was on his way and spoiling for a fight. They didn’t hang around, returning in haste to Vale Road where Paul collected his bike and cycled off home to Forthlin Road.
The quandary for John Lennon was whether or not to invite Paul McCartney to join his group. “Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in—obviously—or not? To make the group stronger or to let me be stronger? And [my] decision was to let Paul in, to make the group stronger … It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join, but he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.”7
When this happened is unclear. Until the final interview John gave, it was established that the process was a gradual one, spanning days or even weeks, but here he explained, “I turned around to him [Paul] right then, on first meeting, and said, ‘Do you want to join the group?’ and I think he said yes the next day, as I recall it.”8
Pete Shotton has a different memory. He says that when he and John walked home at the end of that long day, John said, “What would you think if I invited Paul to join the group?” Pete said he didn’t mind. “About ten days to two weeks later I was walking down Linkstor Road and Paul came around the corner on his bike, and it was exactly there, on the corner of Linkstor Road and Vale Road, that he stopped and we spoke. He said, ‘I’ve come up to see Ivan but he’s not in,’ and I said, ‘Oh by the way, do you want to join the group?’ And he looked at me and he kind of thought for a moment, or pretended to think for a moment, and then he said ‘OK,’ got on his bike and rode off. And that was it.”9 Deceived by the age gap, Pete had no idea Paul was about to become his rival for John’s closest friendship.
John Lennon didn’t pick partners easily, but at 15 years of age Paul McCartney already had enough about him to impress the big league. A boy who believed he was it, and had the ability to back it up, had met another boy who clearly was it—and the fusion of their talents and personalities would change the world.
* * *
* Was Woolton fete the first time John met Paul? A riddle in two paragraphs.
In certain private company, Paul sometimes reveals that he hadn’t only seen John on buses before the Woolton fete, but they’d also exchanged a few words. Paul says he was working as a paper-boy (on his bike, delivering the Echo to local houses in the evenings) when he once talked to John outside the newsagent’s shop. John never mentioned it, and Paul has chosen, consistently for decades, never to say it publicly. He was a paperboy after the McCartneys relocated to Forthlin Road in summer 1956, when he turned 14.
Paul is shy about giving away the shop’s identity to anyone who’d print it, but one local family who knew him think it was “Abbas.” At 166 Aigburth Road, close to the Cast Iron Shore, W. W. Abba would have been an oddly distant place of employment for a lad living and delivering three miles away in Allerton, and—as it was a mile farther still from John’s house—it’s far from being a cast-iron certainty. For now, there’s merely the possibility to digest that McCartney first met Lennon outside a shop called Abba.
SEVEN
JULY–DECEMBER 1957
“HE’LL GET YOU INTO TROUBLE, SON”
Location filming for a new movie, Violent Playground, got under way across Liverpool on the Monday after Saturday’s Woolton fete. It was clearly the place to shoot films about juvenile delinquency: another, These Dangerous Years, had only been released the week before. In this, Liverpool-born singing star Frankie Vaughan, 29, badly miscast as a Teddy Boy, played a troubled Dingle adolescent in hot water with the police and (after his call-up) the army. As if it wasn’t hard enough for boys like Richy Starkey, Roy Trafford and Ian James to survive growing up in Liverpool 8, they had to hear a policeman yelling from the big screen, “You Dingle boys are a menace and a nuisance to the district! Why don’t you get some honest work?”
Playing skiffle with Eddie Clayton introduced a welcome way out from the street-corner existence Richy Starkey had known more than a year. It would take a long time to remove himself completely, but being with a group was an alternative to “walking” with the gang, and when he and Roy weren’t doing one or the other they were often dancing. Both were athletic and acrobatic jivers, accomplished rock and roll dancers able to flip, flop and fly their female partners, hold them up in the air and send them scooting through their legs.
Richy was a good jiver and so was I. We used to go to all the hops, to the Rialto and the Cavern, and girls liked to dance with us because we could do it. We had denim suits and denim jackets so the lads and girls in the Cavern called us “the Binmen.” We had regular jiving partners and loved it. But we were seriously threatened in the Rialto one night. Some feller got stabbed in the face with a pair of scissors and I was told, “You and your mate are next.” We were out of there like a shot. We didn’t like that at all. That was me and Richy—out the door.
Liverpool living required acute environmental awareness: things could alter in a moment, around any corner. But it was far from all bad. Paul McCartney always knew the pluses, saying (in 1984), “I swear to God I’ve never met any people more soulful, more intelligent, more kind [and] more filled with common sense than the people in Liverpool, people who can cut through problems like a hot knife through butter. [They’re] the kind of people you need in life: salt of the earth.”1
At some point in July 1957, Paul finally got his first guitar. It had been a long time coming and he was desperate. As he couldn’t afford to buy one he had the bright idea of swapping his trumpet for it, the one his dad had bought him two years earlier. Jim didn’t mind—it was clear where Paul’s interest was. “I traded in the trumpet for a £15 Zenith guitar from Frank Hessy’s. There was a feller there called Jim Gretty and he showed us (me and George) a great chord. I never knew its name—we called it ‘a jazz chord,’ like an F-shape with a couple of extra things on the first and second string.”2 The Zenith Seventeen was a reasonably good new guitar, cheaper but better than John Lennon’s Gallotone Champion though it too was manufactured from laminates. An archtop acoustic with f-holes, it was made in Germany, and inside the body was a label individually signed by the respecte
d jazz and classical guitarist Ivor Mairants, stating that the instrument had been tested by him to his standards. So longingly and lovingly did these boys cherish their first guitars that Paul would later say of Mairants “he was a God to us,” much as John would always think of his first guitar as GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT.3
Having only played other people’s guitars before, the time had come for Paul to address the problem caused by his left-handedness. Like most guitars, the Zenith was made for a right-handed player, so as before he turned it upside down, everything opposite where it should be, the top string now on the bottom. This didn’t stymie his natural talent—when Paul impressed John in St. Peter’s church hall he was playing guitar upside down—but it wasn’t ideal. The solution came when Paul chanced on a photo of Slim Whitman, possibly in a music press advert but more likely in a record shop, and saw that, though he was playing left-handed, his guitar was strung correctly.* Paul went home, unwound all six strings from the Zenith and threaded them back in what would usually be the reverse order but which, when the guitar was turned upside down for a southpaw, was “correct.”
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