Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  John’s girlfriend in the autumn of 1958 was Thelma Pickles, a new and interesting student at the art school, just turning 17. Initially, she thought him “a smartarse,” then changed her mind when she witnessed his reaction to a girl who asked if what she’d heard about his mother was true. “She said, ‘Hey John, I hear your mother’s dead.’ He didn’t flinch. He simply said, ‘Yeah.’ She carried on, ‘It was a policeman that knocked her down, wasn’t it?’ Again he didn’t react, he just said, ‘That’s right, yeah.’ I was stunned by his detachment, and impressed that he was brave enough not to break down or show any emotion. Of course, it was all a front.”30

  Soon afterward, John and Thelma sat talking at the Queen Victoria Monument and each revealed being deserted by their dads. “He pissed off and left me when I was a baby,” John said of Alf, which was far from correct but no doubt how he felt. Thelma’s father had left home when she was ten; she was sensitive to the stigma of having only one parent and emotional when anyone mentioned it. “I couldn’t sustain the detachment John managed,” she says. “I thought it was quite an achievement to be able to behave like that.”

  Suddenly, John and Thel, as he called her, were “going out.” The shared soul-baring cemented it, and also they fancied each other. Thelma was the first female John allowed to get close after Julia’s terrible death. She was given glimpses of his other side.

  When we discussed it between ourselves I realized he was clearly more sensitive than he appeared. He spoke of the pure shock of losing his mother, and he said what a loss it was (though I don’t think he used the word “loss”). At such times, he spoke in a much softer, more explanatory way than usual, and though he never demonstrated extremes of emotion, his pain was clear. The other side of the coin was that he’d detect any minor frailty in somebody with a laser-like homing device. I thought he was hilarious, but it wasn’t funny to the recipients.31

  Thelma was witness to a rare occasion at Mendips, when John, Paul and George all stood in the kitchen and played their guitars. Mimi was out, and before she was expected back Thelma and the two lads scarpered. John knew Mimi didn’t want them in the house and would raise merry hell about it, and he just didn’t need the headache. For a while, though, John and Thel took regular advantage of Mimi’s going out (it seems she went to play bridge one night a week). The plan, carefully formulated by John, was for Thel (who lived in Knotty Ash) to take the bus to Woolton; she and John would meet and sit across Menlove Avenue in a shelter on the edge of the golf course, and when Mimi left and walked down the street, over they’d go. “I only ever saw Mimi from a distance, in the dark,” Thelma says.

  Mostly, Thel found John “enormous fun to be with, always witty, and when we were alone together he was really soft, thoughtful and generous-spirited.” He made them tea and toast, he made her laugh, and he made love to her in his little bedroom above the porch. “We didn’t call it sex—that word wasn’t really used by people then. John called it ‘going for a five-mile run,’ because he’d read or heard this was the amount of energy a man spent.” They used no protection, trusting only to luck, and John told Thel he was glad she was no “edge of the bed virgin”—his euphemism for the kind of girl who would take him half the way there but no further.

  John and Thel often took afternoons off from art school to go to the pictures. He liked the old horror films at the equally old Palais de Luxe on Lime Street, and they also went to see Elvis’s final pre-army film, King Creole, which reached Liverpool Odeon in mid-October 1958. Though John very occasionally wore his glasses at college, he definitely didn’t do so in public, and without them, even sitting near the front of the stalls, he could hardly make out how his idol was faring up there on the big screen. He kept nudging Thelma, nagging her to describe all the action: “What’s he doing now, Thel?”

  • • •

  King Creole arrived in Liverpool just when his loyal subjects were maturing into wage earners. Skiffle was as good as gone,‡ and though plenty of groups disbanded and many lads gave up performing altogether—going into jobs, further education or relationships—a strong and solid core soldiered on. While the record business (in both Britain and America) focused entirely on solo singers, in Liverpool it was still all about groups, mates together, adopting the Crickets’ template: vocals, electric guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar, drums. Their music drew on the widest range of American rock: some groups incorporated a piano and leaned toward Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino; some went for the instrumental sound of Bill Justis and new guitar star Duane Eddy; some went for a more country influence; and many were wedded to the beat of Chuck Berry, the thrill of Elvis and Little Richard, and the harmonies of the Crickets and the Everly Brothers. For all of them, the invention of the electric bass guitar meant the tea-chest was put back wherever it belonged and the standup bass stayed in jazz. Hessy’s and Liverpool’s other instrument shops enjoyed another spike in business as boys persuaded parents to serve again as guarantors while they upgraded instruments on the drip.

  Because all the available music clubs in town were devoted to jazz, Liverpool’s live rock and roll scene took off in the working-class suburbs, generally to the north and east of the city, in scruffy ballrooms and bleak public halls. It was a process that took a leap in the final months of 1958 and owed entirely to the efforts of a handful of interesting individuals, ordinary men doing extraordinary things, blokes who fancied themselves as dance promoters and risked situations just this side of hell to put on entertainment and make a few quid for their trouble. As the old guard melted away, the first of the new wave was Sam Leach, a 22-year-old from Norris Green who decided to put on groups in a local hall for no other reason than he was a mad rock and roll fan.

  Never a deskbound businessman, Leach’s promotions were ambitious and chaotic. In his first real venture he set himself up as manager of Mossway Jiving Club, which opened for business on November 28 at Mossway Hall in Croxteth. From such tiny acorns, planted in the blood and crunch of appalling Teddy Boy violence, a huge scene would unfold. Members signed up to a six-page booklet of club rules Leach nicked first to last from the Cavern’s. The club secretary was a quiet tax-office clerk, Richard (Dick) Matthews, 28, Leach’s good mate and a gifted amateur photographer—his pictures would capture in stunning monochrome the first era of Merseyside rock. Together they drew up a leaflet for the Mossway that specified a four-point plan, their manifesto, in which they promised patrons:

  1) Three-and-a-half hours of solid rock ’n’ roll.

  2) The very best bands on Merseyside plus the top records.

  3) Good companionship, where guy meets doll.

  4) One of the best halls in Liverpool.

  John, Paul and George played no part in this emerging scene. Just when it was all going forward they seemed to be going backward. Their group was gone. They had nicknames for each other—Lennie, Macca and Hazza32—and got together only to go to the pictures, chat up girls, play guitars, have lots of laughs, and keep up with current records. Among their playgrounds was 97 School Lane in Woolton, Bobby Dykins’ new place. Knowing when Twitchy was at work, or heading out to the local pub, John led his accomplices around the back of the house, where the larder window was kept open. Someone (George, if he was with them) would squeeze through, open the front door and they’d pile in. The others took the lead from John’s attitude, having little regard for Dykins’ property: one time Paul broke his record player; another time he scratched one of Dykins’ own records (which Paul says Dykins subsequently gave him hell for); George plugged the pickup of his guitar through the radiogram and blew the speaker. They also raided the larder, made themselves tea and sandwiches and then snuck away before he returned, after a not always wholly successful attempt at restoring everything the way they’d found it.33

  It was around this time that Jim McCartney tried again to make Paul learn the piano properly. Paul was keen, but kind of hoped that Dad would show him; Jim still declined, knowing he’d be passing on untutored bad habits to a
boy with a great natural gift. He found the money for lessons for both Paul and Mike, and thoughtfully picked a young man to teach them, Leonard Milne, a 21-year-old piano graduate and tutor who lived just across the other side of Mather Avenue.

  I gave Paul one lesson a week, at a grand piano I had in the lounge at my parents’ house, 237 Mather Avenue. He started on The Adult Beginner’s Guide to Musical Notation but this didn’t last long because he said he wanted to learn by “chord symbols,” letters printed under the notes—like “C7,” say. It’s a musical shorthand he would have known as a guitar player. He didn’t want to learn the real technique, he wanted to rush ahead—he was clearly a boy with talent who didn’t want to be held back. I also didn’t set homework because Paul made it clear he wanted to press on, not fiddle around with paper.34

  To Milne’s disappointment, but not surprise, the lessons quickly came to an end. Paul put up with them about as long as he’d endured his previous tuition, when the McCartneys had lived in Speke. Not only did he not want to be told rules, feeling he’d already gone a long way beyond them, he wasn’t going to be bounced into anything either. “I always had great [attitude] difficulties with it, I couldn’t get interested … there was no way I wanted to go back to simple exercises, I just couldn’t do it, it seemed boring, like homework … I didn’t like to have to come back to the hard, rigid discipline.”35

  Jim was despairing. He did what he could to keep the leash on Paul’s passive rebellion but Paul was just so skilled at winning his way … on top of which “that John Lennon” was constantly barking seditious thoughts in his ear (“Tell him to fuck off!”). Though Jim no longer took Paul to Bioletti’s, the barber at the Penny Lane roundabout, he still told him when he must take himself there. As Paul pedaled along the road, so his grumbles projected into the future, when he would be a father—“No way am I going to be like my dad! I’m not going to be as strict as he is! If any one of my kids wants to wear long hair, they can do it!” He’d return home later with, so far as Jim was concerned, either the merest of trims or no trim at all. “It would just look the same, and I’d say, ‘Was it closed, then?’ He just wore me down.”36

  Paul was also still getting together with John to write songs. Though their productivity seems to have slowed by autumn 1958, their ideas were merely branching out. Around October, perhaps during the half-term week at the end of the month, Paul made another visit to Mendips (“John! Your little friend’s here again!”) and was happy to find John typing a new poem. Actually, it wasn’t a poem, it was more of a lunatic short story. Paul took one look and loved the wordplay, the typical Lennon phrases like “a cup of teeth” and “in the early owls of the morecombe.” John called it “On Safairy With Whide Hunter” and its origin was clear: it was from White Hunter, an adventure serial being shown by Granada (the local ITV station)—weekly yarns about “the surest and fastest shot in Africa,” overblown scripts brimming with “bwana.”

  John let Paul join in and the satire became a way-out Lennon-McCartney Original.§ Though some lines are characteristically John’s, especially the trademark renaming of the lead character every time he was mentioned (Whide Hunter is also Wipe Hudnose, Whide Hungry, Wheat Hoover and Whit Monday), others are probably Paul’s (“Could be the Flying Docker on a case” and also “No! but mable next week it will be my turn to beat the bus now standing at platforbe nine”). One imagines the two of them in stitches when they came up with lines like “All too soon they reached a cleaner in the jumble and set up cramp.” Another sentence—“Jumble Jim, whom shall remain nameless, was slowly but slowly asking his way through the underpants”—could well have been a reference to Jim McCartney.37

  Perhaps emboldened by their Safairy—or, more likely and much less prosaically, because they were having a laff—John and Paul also started to write a play. Two pages of an exercise book were filled with dialog about a Jesus-like figure they called Pilchard, who lived in a working-class slum in the north of England. Coinciding with Paul’s Durband-inspired literary phase, the hero was not going to be seen but merely referred to, as in “He’s upstairs praying.” Things ground to a halt when it hit the writers that plays need structure; theirs didn’t have one, and they couldn’t be bothered to put in the effort. Paul says it had “a suburban parlor setting,” which squares with its first description in print, four years later, when he told writer-poet Adrian Mitchell (then of the Daily Mail) it was “about a feller called Pilchard who was Jesus come back into the slums.”38 At this same time, Lennon-McCartney wrote a comedy song called “I Fancy Me Chances,” set in a Liverpool dance hall and designed to be sung in a thick adenoidal Scouse voice. If connected to the play, it would have made it a musical.

  I fancy me chances with you / I fancy me chances with you.

  When we’re at the dances, I fancy me chances / I fancy me chances with you.39

  John, Paul and George performed only a handful of times at most in these last months of 1958, a private party or two, a low-key dance here and maybe there, nothing advertised, details nonexistent. They went out as a trio of singing guitarists and, if challenged over the absence of a drummer, had a ready-made reply they felt was close to unanswerable: “The rhythm’s in the guitars”—said with as much bluff as they could muster (which was quite a lot). The group name changed on a whim. Once they were the Rainbows because they all wore different color shirts. Everything was done for laughs: at one party they turned up with cabbages and a workman’s red lamp pinched along the way. In spite of the absence of opportunity, the three lads still hungered for fame, riches and freedom from tyranny: Tony Carricker was deeply impressed when John said to him at this time, “I’ll play me guitar in pubs but I’m not working for a living, I’m not going to actually work.” As Tony notes, “This was revolutionary talk in 1958.” But how on earth could it be achieved?

  And then, right on cue, back into their lives came the Savile Row–suited starmaker himself, Carroll Levis, dangling the promise of a spot on his weekly ATV show.

  It was close on eighteen months since phase one of the Quarry Men auditioned for and played in a Levis show at Liverpool Empire, before Paul and George had joined. Quite how they found themselves back in the Canadian’s orbit this time is a mystery, but George seems to have been the propelling force, somehow hearing of an audition being held in the Manchester area. They got there by train and weren’t the only Liverpudlians to make the journey: George recognized and chatted to a quiet lad from the Dingle, an Elvis fan called Ronnie Wycherley, who had a solo act, singing his own song (“Margo”) while playing acoustic guitar. There are few degrees of separation in Liverpool: Wycherley was Arthur Kelly’s cousin.

  This time Lennie, Macca and Hazza called themselves Johnny and the Moondogs and only Paul and George played guitar.40 John’s Gallotone Champion was GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT but not GUARANTEED NOT TO BE PULVERIZED. Having been on the receiving end of some heavy Lennon aggression in recent times, the once precious possession, bought for him on the drip by Julia, was now in pieces—“smashed in half” was how he described it. His next move was predictable: on their way out of the Manchester theater after auditioning for Levis, John spotted a guitar propped up against a wall and “slap leathered” it. Three boys and two guitars arrived in Manchester, three boys and three guitars left. According to Arthur Kelly, John’s new instrument was a piece of garbage, even worse than the old Gallotone. “It wasn’t even a nice guitar shape and I never once saw John play it. I said to George, ‘Couldn’t he have nicked something better?’ ”41

  Johnny and the Moondogs were told they’d hear by post if they were needed back for the actual TV Star Search stage show, and Louise would always remember George’s excitement when he arrived home from the Institute one day to find a letter saying they’d passed the audition.42 It specified a particular night (in the week commencing Monday, November 24) when, second half of the second house, they were expected to perform at Manchester Hippodrome. John, Paul and George, with their supporter Arthur, took the
train to Manchester a second time; Paul remembers them rehearsing the Buddy Holly numbers “Think It Over” and “Rave On” along the way.

  The Manchester Evening News review of the opening show declared, “Never have so many electric guitars been plugged into amplifiers in such a short time, or so many incomprehensible words yelled in would-be Western accents.” Despite Levis’ desire for complete Variety, most of the would-be stars were teenage boys performing rock and roll. It was big in Manchester too—not as big as in Liverpool, but still big. One of the acts was a pair of local lads, Ricky & Dane, actually Allan Clarke and Graham Nash. The latter would recall how Johnny and the Moondogs “had a raw edge—they looked as if they didn’t give a shit about being there.”43

  John didn’t bring the stolen guitar back to Manchester in case it was recognized, so the three agreed to stand together, Moondogs flanking Johnny who stood slightly behind them, his arms around their shoulders. The effect must have pleased the eye: as Paul was left-handed and George right-handed, both guitars were pointing out toward the audience. Their appearance wouldn’t have looked nearly as good had George still been small, as he was in Mike McCartney’s March photo, but he’d had a good growth spurt and was now close to John and Paul’s height. Restricted to performing one song, they did “Think It Over”; Paul remembers John effecting a casual look while he sang, and Paul and George added the ba-ba-baah backing. It isn’t known if they plugged into Paul’s Elpico amp or just used the house PA; either way, they’ll have struggled to project their sound into the gods of the two-thousand-capacity Hippodrome.

  The Levis setup was the same as usual: acts did their one piece then ran off and were expected to return to the stage at the end of the night, when Levis would determine the winning act on the strength of audience applause. Arthur Kelly had done his best to set the right tone during their spot—“my job was to clap and yell and make as much noise as possible”—and of course he’d repeat this in the finale. There was plenty of hanging about in between, and all the lads were busy ogling Jackie Collins, the younger sister of starlet actress Joan, who was Levis’ compere throughout his 1958 stage tour. Arthur clearly remembers her: “She was wearing quite a low-cut dress and seemed well-endowed. John said, ‘Look at the fuckin’ tits on ’er!’—as if we wouldn’t have noticed them ourselves.”