Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  YOUNG SCHOOLDAYS

  John (back row, second left), almost 12, with other Quarry Bank first-formers. The blond lad to his left is his best pal and partner in crimes, Pete Shotton.

  Richy (front, left) in class IV at St. Silas primary, 1948–9. Aged eight, and just back from a year in the hospital, he’s fallen hopelessly behind.

  Paul (back row, top left) aged about nine at Joseph Williams primary—reading a comic and catching the eye.

  George (back row, fifth from right) aged about seven at Dovedale Road infants. At five, he instructed Louise never to stand at the school gate and gossip like the other mothers.

  Dangerously ill from the eve of his seventh birthday, Richy in Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital—a happy shot that belies a bleak and tedious yearlong recovery from peritonitis. Three times doctors predicted he wouldn’t last the night.

  Hoylake, April 16, 1955—the grand opening of Clarendon Furnishing, Brian Epstein installed as manager by his mother Queenie (to his right) and father Harry (left). In front is BBC presenter Muriel Levy, who performed at the opening.

  George with Jenny Brewer at Sandy Bay camp site, Exmouth, Devon, August 1956—when he asked if she’d heard “the real one”: Elvis.

  The earliest known photo of any Liverpool group playing any venue. Richy lays the rhythm with some standup snare at the always frightening Wilson Hall, Garston, May 23, 1957. The Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group are fellow apprentices from his Toxteth factory: lifelong friend Roy Trafford sings and plucks the tea-chest bass; Clayton (right) is probably the best guitarist on the scene.

  A hot Saturday in Woolton, July 6, 1957: John Lennon, 16, runs his Quarry Men through a set at St. Peter’s church fete, singing Elvis, Gene and Lonnie. When he steps down from the stage, his great pal Ivan Vaughan introduces him to Paul McCartney, 15.

  George with his best mate Arthur Kelly and their cherished first guitars. The scene is a Speke backyard in summer 1957 but could be anywhere in Liverpool. Right across the city, boys are picking up guitars … and Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” is only weeks away.

  Boys with front at the front. John has instantly invited his talented new friend to join him at the vocal mikes. Colin, Len and Eric are the other Quarry Men here at New Clubmoor Hall, November 23, 1957. This presentation—Paul left, John right—stayed more or less constant in all the years to come.

  ELEVEN

  JULY–DECEMBER 1959

  “COME VIZ ME TO ZE CASBAH”

  John Lennon was not cut out for laboring. “He absolutely hated it,” says Tony Carricker. “He told me he used to pray every morning the train would crash.”

  John’s desire to buy an electric guitar, and at the same time show Mimi he could get it if he really wanted, came at the cost of blood, sweat and possibly a new world record in swearing. Tony and his father drove to Scarisbrick each day without him. “We didn’t take John because we lived in Widnes and it was a different route—and also because me dad couldn’t stand him.” As the working day began at eight, John had to get up around five, which for a teenager who loved sleep and hated going to bed early was a constant problem. His journey entailed train changes and a crosstown walk before he got to distant Ormskirk, where the Carrickers collected him. If John was late and missed them he had to make further train changes to finally land up at Bescar Lane, a tiny station in the middle of Lancashire fields. From there he would trudge along country lanes to the building site. And that was before his working day even began, when those artistic hands grabbed the pickax in ineffective anger. As Tony says, “We weren’t skilled, we were the lowest of the pecking order, doing the lighter end of the work: wielding pickaxes, shoveling. I found that laboring didn’t hurt me. Once the hands stopped bleeding, after a couple of weeks, I could enjoy it. John hated every minute of it—he had no physical reserves at all.”1

  It must have been Murphy’s law that dictated John Lennon’s labor pains should occur during one of those rare golden summers in Britain, the sun beating down every day without respite, a month or more of heat wave and everyone complaining. The purpose of their work was to ready the ground for the construction of a new water pumping station, excavating and preparing foundations, but whatever the stresses and strains, they couldn’t complain about £5 a week. John’s new guitar homed closer into view with every f-f-f-f-flourish of that pickax.

  George was also involved in construction work at this time—of a sort. He’d been “freelancing” with the Les Stewart Quartet about six months when, as Stewart clearly recalls, a woman approached them all one Sunday night outside Lowlands youth club after a show. She lived just across the road, she explained, in a similar house at number 8, and was planning to open a rival club in her cellar. It was going to be made by teenagers for teenagers, and have a resident live group. Did they want to have a look around?

  The woman was Mrs. Mona Best, a dusky-skinned Anglo-Indian who’d sailed into Liverpool at Christmas 1945 as the wartime bride of Johnny Best, the city’s well-known boxing promoter. Mona’s eldest son—she called him Peter—was born in Madras and was four years old when their ship docked in Liverpool. Known to his friends as Pete, he was now a very quiet though sporty 17-year-old, halfway through his A-Level course at Liverpool Collegiate grammar school. The combination of two factors—Peter bringing home friends and Mona’s urge to foster that, as well as the good nights he’d had at Lowlands—inspired her to announce they could have a place just like it in their very own house. What better way for Peter and his younger brother Rory to be surrounded by friends than having their own exclusive club? And she could do it: Mona Best was a perpetual can-do woman, a human hurricane to whom everything was possible, especially for her adored sons.

  George went to have a look around the place with Les and the others. It was going to be interesting—strangely, a second members-only teenagers’ coffee-bar club on this quiet, leafy lane, a clone of Lowlands but more trendy. They accepted Mona’s invitation to get involved. As Shelagh Maguire remembers, “Mrs. Best said if we would help convert her cellar into a club then she would give the group the weekly residency. So Les, Ray, Ken, George, me and one or two others all started to paint the place and get it ready, working evenings and weekends.”2

  Paul’s temporary job with Lewis’s gave him real money for the first time, a fabulous feeling, and he was both flush and well placed to inject some impetus into his record collection. A succession of important buys and experiences came together in this short space of time—memories he would always recall with affection.

  One was the new Chuck Berry single, “Back in the USA” c/w “Memphis, Tennessee,” issued in Britain on the consistently superb London label. Paul (or John) bought it, and shared the joys together. “I remember learning Memphis up in John’s bedroom—it had the greatest guitar riff ever,” Paul says.3 It also had an impact on songwriters Lennon-McCartney: Paul would always cite the line “hurry-home drops on her cheek” as a lesson in lyrical economy, much as they admired the Buddy Holly line in “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” “drunk man—streetcar—foot slip—there you are.” This was their poetry.

  Another new release that resonated—though with Paul alone, not at all with John or George—was “The Honeymoon Song,” a tender and sweetly melodic Mediterranean ballad by the Marino Marini Quartet, issued by Decca UK’s Italian label Durium. Several other important new singles were then issued as August headed into September. The Everly Brothers had “(’Til) I Kissed You,” another great harmony piece, and death hadn’t stopped Buddy Holly releasing records: “Peggy Sue Got Married” c/w “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” made a big impression and few realized the elaborate production work that turned Holly’s rough home demos into finished masters. (John, Paul and George particularly liked the catchy B-side, another good harmony piece for them to practice.) Other hot new 45s included, on Parlophone, the driving R&B rocker “Leave My Kitten Alone” by Little Willie John; and “Linda Lu” by Ray Sharpe, the B-side of which was a swinging rock upda
te of the old number “Red Sails in the Sunset”—as sung by Alf Lennon in many a floating Pig & Whistle saloon in the 1930s. All these went into their collective bag.*

  Unless Paul was out late on Saturdays with John and George, the day that began with a lie-in to the sounds of Saturday Club ended with the radio tuned to the same Light Programme for Pick of the Pops, running up to midnight with an hour of chart hits and new releases.† On July 25, host David Jacobs played the new single by Ray Charles—in fact, he played both sides of it: “What’d I Say” was one long track, at 6:25, split into two parts for the disc, its electric piano and call-and-response vocals spinning joyously on and on. Passion for a new song can sometimes be instant, and this was one such time: Paul leaned out of bed, scribbled it down and bought it on release date. Few others in Britain did the same, which meant that “What’d I Say” didn’t break into the NME Top Thirty, but its impact was colossal. This one recording constructed the bridge back from rock and roll to rhythm and blues; it was gospel too, and a major step toward the breakthrough of soul music. It was a great favorite of John, Paul and George, as Paul recalls: “Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’ was one of our favorites: this record blew our socks off.”4

  As the summer holidays progressed, Paul and George set out on their second consecutive adventure together, their plan being to hitchhike from the northwest to the southwest of England, down the spine, and then take it from there. The first destination was the only known factor: Sandy Bay holiday camp in Exmouth, where George had been with his mum and dad in 1955 and ’56, befriending Jenny Brewer, with whom he was maintaining a warm pen-pal relationship. Paul and George each had a haversack into which they stuffed a towel and swimming trunks, one or two changes of clothes, toothbrush and toothpaste, comb and hair grease. Paul took his guitar, and it seems George took one too.5 They had a small cooking stove heated by methylated spirit, and one or two cans of spaghetti and rice pudding, to be eaten straight from warmed-up tins. They had cigarettes, a camera and little money, just £2 10s each, planning to hitchhike everywhere and sleep any place they could find for nothing. It turned out to be a week of hungry days, cold nights and general discomfort, but, these things being what they are, they’d love remembering the good bits.

  They set out on Saturday, August 15, “thumbing a ride”—crooking a digit at passing motorists in the direction of travel. Though Britain’s first motorway wasn’t yet open, they managed to cover two hundred miles this first day and by Sunday lunchtime had hitched the extra seventy miles down to Sandy Bay. This was their destination, but they stayed just one night. Paul says they had twin aims—to pull birds, and show the local groups how to play guitar—and maybe Exmouth didn’t provide the opportunities. The following morning they were back on the road and heading deeper into the West Country; there was talk of Torquay, but really they’d be going wherever, like one of those “mystery tour” coach trips advertised in the resort shopwindows. A third aim of the week was to drink as much beer as possible, provided barmen turned a blind eye to their youth. In one pub they met a drunk whose name, he said, was Oxo Whitney. Paul and George thought it hysterically funny and repeated it the rest of the holiday. This Monday night was spent on the beach at Paignton where, though temporarily warmed by a couple of “Salvation Army girls” (as George would remember them), they shivered for hours, waking with aching limbs.6

  A ride thumbed on Tuesday took them back inland, at which point—by design or otherwise—they left the West Country behind. In need of a proper bed, Paul had the idea they could gate-crash Butlin’s in Pwllheli, where Bett and Mike Robbins would surely see them right. They headed back north, reached Wales by the Aust Ferry, and when eventually they arrived at Butlin’s were met with the barbed-wire fences erected to keep nonpayers out (and payers in). In tandem with the grim chalets—still the old naval training base huts—it put George in mind of a German prisoner-of-war camp from any one of a dozen 1950s British films. And though they saw Bett and Mike Robbins, they couldn’t stay at the camp without paying, or else it was full, because they moved on again, around the coast to Harlech and back to the Brierleys’ farmhouse where they’d stayed a week in 1958. This time they spent the last couple of nights here.

  They planned to be back in Liverpool by the Saturday afternoon, August 22, because George had an evening booking with the Les Stewart Quartet at a British Legion social club. Either they set off late or they had difficulty hitching a lift, because by the time George arrived in West Derby it was all over … bar the shouting, as Les Stewart recalls:

  It was only me and Ray Skinner [drums] who showed up. No Ken Brown and no George Harrison. I had to do it all myself and it was really horrible. I was pretty steamed about the whole thing, and just as we were leaving the guys showed up. I chewed them out about it and basically told them to get lost. Mona Best’s club was due to open the following week and they asked me what would happen about it, and I said, “Well you take it. I don’t want to do it.” I broke up the group and gave up the residency at the new club, after all the time I’d put in cleaning up and painting that cellar.7

  It wasn’t only the end of the line for the Les Stewart Quartet, it was a headache for Mona Best, who’d lost her new club’s resident group just days before its opening. She did have a name for the place though. As she surveyed the redecoration, the cellar’s nooks and crannies put her in mind of the film Algiers, starring Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer; it was set in the native quarter of Algeria’s capital, the walled citadel—the Casbah—with its narrow alleys and souks. She took this as her inspiration: it would be called the Casbah Coffee Club, known to one and all simply as the Casbah.

  But who would play the opening night? George Harrison and Ken Brown could hardly play as a duo. Each did sing a song or two but they couldn’t hold together a whole performance, besides which they’d no desire to strike out as a pair: they weren’t particular friends, they were simply the backing bit of the Quartet.8 It was a problem, but George knew the solution. He told Mrs. Best there were a couple of other lads likely to be keen and available, then phoned John and Paul to break the news: there was a booking, and an open-ended Saturday-night residency if they went down well. It was nearly four months since the last Japage 3 performance and dates had been few and far between all through 1959. They grabbed at it.

  During the week, Paul and John and John’s new girlfriend Cynthia—he usually called her Cyn—joined George and Ken at the house to take a look around. Mrs. Best was never backward in coming forward: she made sure they were all given a paintbrush and set to work. She asked John to paint a ceiling in black matt. Her son Pete remembers how, much to everyone’s amusement, John first painted some of his characteristic cartoon figures, sexless humans with grotesque limbs and three toes, and then obliterated them as he completed the job … though perhaps because of his shortsightedness he used gloss instead of matt and Mrs. Best worried it wouldn’t dry in time.9 Paul was also busy with a brush, painting a ceiling in stripes of varying colors—“It was great to be involved in the birth of a coffee bar, they were such important places then. The concrete and wood in the basement had been stripped and we painted each part a different color. And after we’d painted it up, it was ‘our club.’ ”10

  Pete Best watched the three lads who, with Ken, were looking around the cellar of his house. He noticed how the arty one, John, “looked and acted the leader from the start,” and how he alone decided where they would play “while Paul and George hovered in the background silently agreeing.”11 John chose a spot in a cozy nook right under Paul’s multicolored ceiling. All that remained was to talk with Ken Brown about what songs they’d be likely to do, and have a quick, loose rehearsal. George knew Ken’s style of playing and the sound he got from his Hofner Senator, and John and Paul had seen him with Les’s Quartet. Though disappointed that instead of a drummer or bass player they were getting yet another guitarist—even more rhythm in the guitars—Ken did have a Watkins “Westminster” ten-watt amplifier with three inputs.
George could plug in, and when he got his new guitar so could John; Paul could plug into his Elpico. They’d be an all-electric band.12

  Saturday’s Casbah date gave John’s decision a deadline, and he bought himself his first good guitar on the Friday, August 28, 1959. He chose the same instrument as George, a Hofner Club 40, and Hessy’s hire-purchase document shows that a £17 deposit was put down, requiring him to pay a further five shillings a week for fifty-three weeks for a total outlay of £30 9s.13 Confusion remains over who paid the £17: Mimi always said she did, and perhaps that’s so, but this was why John had been sweating and swearing at Scarisbrick all these weeks, and he had the cash. His occupation is written on the document as “Student” while Mary Elizabeth Smith—Mimi—is his guarantor, legalizing the contract by signing her name across a postage stamp (effectively paying a small government tax), so she was certainly present in the shop. There’d been some battle to reach this moment. Mimi was still lecturing John that he must try to resist distractions and focus on his studies, so he could qualify and get a proper job. Tired of repeating herself over and over, Mimi distilled her cautionary advice into a saying that would be aired many times during the next few years and become something of a joke between them: “The guitar’s all right for a hobby but it won’t earn you any money.”14

  All the same, having challenged John to show just how much he wanted this guitar, having seen how he was even prepared to suffer blistered hands for it, working on a building site, Mimi had to concede that in his summer-of-glove John had done just that. Resignedly, she accepted that this guitar business was something he needed to get out of his system; and John’s timing was as good as ever because he was sacked at Scarisbrick this same day. His employment card records the fact that he began work there on July 20 and left on August 28—a total of six weeks—and the reason for his departure is given as “Unsuitable.” As Tony Carricker recalls, John’s time as a laborer came to an end when “he burned the arse out of the kettle,” putting a fire under it without first filling it with water.