Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  The McCartneys’ hard work began to pay off just as their boys were reaching adolescence: their stable family home hosted extended family gatherings, and they cherished their front garden and parlor piano. Jim’s brothers and sisters gathered regularly for “pound nights” (rent parties), where aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered to pool pounds of sugar, tea, and goods, and continued a family tradition of weekly sing-alongs. Dykins and his two daughters were never quite welcome at Mimi’s home; an extended Stanley family sing-along was for dreamers.

  Jim did the crossword puzzles and helped his boys plunk out tunes on the piano. Paul’s cousin Bett Robbins showed them ukulele chords when she babysat. For his fourteenth birthday, Jim gave Paul a trumpet, which he traded in for a guitar because of his growing attachment to Radio Luxembourg’s evening broadcasts. This radio station alone was enough to cement a fast friendship with Lennon. Much like Judy had done with her speakers, Jim hooked up an extension cord for the downstairs radiogram so that Paul could listen from his bed upstairs via a pair of headphones.

  Being left-handed, Paul struggled to figure out exactly how to master the guitar’s fret board. At first, he restrung the guitar in reverse, so that all the low strings were on top, and learned to play chords upside down with his left hand. “It wasn’t until I found a picture of Slim Whitman, who was also left-handed [that I realized] I had the guitar the wrong way round,” McCartney remembers.2 Turning the guitar around to strum with his left hand, and relearning his chords using his right, got him sorted out.

  Barely a year into their new Allerton home, Mary, then forty-six, took ill. After months of ignoring symptoms of fatigue and indigestion, a wrenching pain took hold of her coming home from a visit to her boys at their Scout camp in August 1956. Even then, she simply popped an indigestion tablet and kept moving. But the attacks became more frequent, and more painful. Privately, Mary feared the worst about the lump she had discovered in her breast. Finally she consented to see a doctor. She asked Jim’s sister to accompany her to the hospital, and when Dill Mohan arrived at Forthlin Road on the morning of October 30, 1956, she found Mary cleaning house. Dill remembers thinking how Forthlin Road looked like “a pin in paper,” a Scouse colloquialism for “impeccably tidy.” Mary had laid out the boys’ clothes on their beds for the next day’s school, “in case I don’t come back.”3

  By the time she went under the knife, later that same day, the cancer was long past inoperable. Mary had seen enough cases to know her prognosis. Paul and Michael were taken in to visit her in recovery and were shocked to see her transformation from upbeat mother to unrecognizably ravaged victim. That night, at about 9:30 P.M., Jim arrived unannounced at the Eagle Hotel, on Paradise Street, where his friends the Mohans were tending bar in the backroom of their half-filled pub. He was physically wasted and distraught; all he could manage to say was “She’s gone.” Mary had suffered an embolism and died shortly after the boys left. Paul was only fourteen. “What are we going to do without her money?” he blurted out to his father.4 McCartney has obsessed over this quote ever since, an outburst of financial anxiety in the midst of trauma that shows not just how narrowly they were getting by, but how conscious the boys were of their predicament. Distraught, Jim took Paul and Michael to stay with his sister Jin in Huyton, North Liverpool. Auntie Jin tucked them into a single bed, where they cried themselves to sleep. Within weeks, McCartney had written his first song: “I Lost My Little Girl.”

  After several months of songwriting, McCartney met Lennon at the St. Peter’s Garden Fête. The friendship between the two boys blossomed, to the consternation of their elders. “Aunt Mimi disapproved because she thought Paul was a working-class lad who was encouraging her nephew to devote time to his guitar which should have been spent studying,” writes McCartney’s authorized biographer, Barry Miles. And Jim McCartney smelled something funny about Lennon: “After one meeting he told Paul, ‘He’ll get you into trouble, son.’ ”5

  But McCartney’s early recollections of John zeroed in on some of the things his dad couldn’t see: for one thing, his living-room walls were lined with books, and while Lennon may have been boasting about having read “all of them,” it was clear he’d read quite a few. McCartney observed another unusual Lennon accoutrement: “I used to go round to Aunt Mimi’s house and John would be at the typewriter, which was fairly unusual in Liverpool. None of my mates even knew what a typewriter was. Well, they knew what one was, but they didn’t have one. Nobody had a typewriter.” 6

  Mostly, though, they listened to 45s and talked about music. “We spent hours just listening to the stars we admired,” John recalled. “We’d sit round and look all intent and intense and then . . . try and reproduce the same sort of sounds for ourselves.”7

  McCartney remembers the time fondly:

  We’d often get in the little glass-paneled porch on the front door looking out on to the front garden and Menlove Avenue. There was a good acoustic there, like a bathroom acoustic, and also it was the only place Mimi would let us make noise. We were relegated to the vestibule. I remember singing “Blue Moon” in there, the Elvis version, trying to figure out the chords. . . . Then we’d go up to John’s room and we’d sit on the bed and play records, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry. It’s a wonderful memory: I don’t often get nostalgic, but the memory of sitting listening to records in John’s bedroom is so lovely, a nice nostalgic feeling, because I realise just how close I was to John.8

  One of Mimi Smith’s great strokes of parenting coincided with the budding Lennon-and-McCartney partnership in 1957. John had flunked out of Quarry Bank during his senior year, and shortly after the St. Peter’s fête, he and Nigel Walley capped off a night of drinking by signing up for the merchant marine at first light. When Mimi found out about it, she marched down to the recruitment office and had John’s name scratched.9

  Desperate to get John into a more secure situation, Mimi lobbied hard to get her nephew an interview at Liverpool Art College. She found an ally in Quarry Bank’s headmaster, Mr. Pobjoy, who wrote a letter of recommendation, which until now has been trotted out as a classic of faint praise, with its claim that despite his borderline O-level scores, Lennon was “not beyond redemption.” In tandem with that “bound to fail” quote, from a Quarry Bank math teacher, it seemed to render Lennon’s performance indistinguishable from his promise, fudging the more complicated reality.

  Lennon’s portfolio of drawings and cartoons squeaked his art-school application through, along with the advantage that he could commute from Woolton and the college wouldn’t need to find him housing. For Lennon’s generation, art college was Britain’s relief hatch for creative kids of all stripes, outsiders who didn’t fit conventional career molds, as a short list of English rockers testifies: Keith Richards (Sidcup Art College); Ron Wood, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, Thunderclap Newman, and Freddie Mercury (Ealing); Eric Clapton (Kingston), Syd Barrett (Camberwell); Roger Waters (Regent Street Polytechnic); Jimmy Page (Sutton), Charlie Watts (Harrow); Cat Stevens (Hammersmith). Mimi assumed Lennon would learn a trade, and in a roundabout way, he did; these institutions wound up training the British Invasion.10

  This same year, 1957, saw the UK rock ’n’ roll scene bust open with new singers and material that convinced fans how wrong the skeptics were. Following that initial ballast of Lonnie Donegan setting skiffle’s mousetrap for Elvis Presley, everything seemed to unfold in a parade of unlikely yet inevitable new characters telling new stories in outrageously new ways. Between 1955 and 1958, Presley led a seemingly unending parade of titans like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, the Platters, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, and the Coasters, supported by a slew of sideshows like the Teddy Bears (with Phil Spector). In relatively no time at all, here was a sea change of fresh sounds and ideas, with songs like “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “To Know Her Is to Love Her,” hatching soulful innocence from desperate possibility, fathomless
certitude from gaping inexperience. Along the way, certain American characters passed through the UK’s cultural looking glass for personas that often outstripped what they enjoyed at home.

  Buddy Holly appeared just as Lennon and McCartney struck up their musical friendship, and they worshipped him as only teenagers could, devouring his records and studying them the way some geeks take apart clocks, just to see how they work: Holly’s recordings were so cleverly layered that to learn and perform them comprised a tutorial in rock form. In doing so, Lennon sponged as much from Holly’s persona as from his music. Holly’s untouchable lyricism in their minds also influenced Lennon’s choice of the melodious McCartney as writing partner, like a tyrant who leans on his diplomat. Holly had started out in a country-and-western duo called Buddy and Bob, which opened for Elvis Presley in early 1955 at the Fair Park Coliseum in Lubbock, Texas. When Presley passed through town again five months later, Holly offered to drive him around: Buddy and Elvis, cruising around Lubbock together, talking trash. Holly started doing Presley songs in sets with his new band, which became the Crickets. His “That’ll Be the Day” hit the American airwaves in July 1957; he had cribbed the song’s title from a catchphrase of John Wayne’s in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Once Presley’s career gained traction, rock ’n’ roll records began to leap across the Atlantic like fire across rooftops. When “That’ll Be the Day” topped the UK charts in September 1957, this new stylistic coup gained momentum.

  In Britain, the Presley fad spawned predictable imitators, pretenders like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard, who smiled their good looks and nonthreatening attitudes into domesticated frames; their pale imitations made Elvis seem all the more dangerous. But most Americans still don’t appreciate Holly’s impact on British ears. His “square” looks and verbal fluency made him the most English of early rockers, and his UK listeners adored him for completely different reasons. Naming their band after Holly’s Crickets laced Lennon and McCartney’s ambition with clairvoyance; they drew from both Holly’s sound and his image. To begin with, Holly created a space to stand within Presley’s shadow without being the slightest bit derivative. “That’ll Be the Day” was an angry song, sure—Buddy Holly was telling his girl off, to get a clue—but he did it without the trademark Presley sneer. In fact, announcing his love so boldly set Buddy Holly free, and gave his awkward stance some heft and swagger. He hiccupped his hormones out loud, and those wire-framed glasses, the facial equivalent of pocket protectors, only accented his normalcy, as if he’d put quotes around it. In doing so, Holly flipped everybody’s high-school jitters into metaphor.

  Holly’s genius sidestepped Presley’s sexual confidence. Male fans like Lennon thrilled to Presley’s rebellious flight but found his sexual bravado, his self-confidence with women, out of reach. Where Presley was at ease singing to and about women, Holly romanced with a stuttering resolve that spoke more to male vulnerability and insecurity: “Uh well-uh, well-uh, well-uh, the little things you say and do . . .” If an awkward kid like Holly could approach women with stutters and baby talk, his gawky façade suddenly rebounded as an asset. Metaphorically, Holly’s persona glowed with possibility—through his songs, you didn’t have to be a smoothy like Elvis to score on the dance floor. In Holly, the young Lennon learned how tough didn’t have to mean a lack of cheer, that seemingly white-bread sensibilities could master the grittiest R&B material (Holly even did Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”), and that good humor could make even the most looming threat irresistible (“I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be/You’re gonna give your love to me . . .”).

  Once his sound pulled you in, Holly’s appearance yanked a chain to make everyday stuff seem radical. At first, Holly wore traditional wire-framed glasses, but after trying contact lenses he switched over to even thicker, all-plastic frames: horn-rimmed, of the type archconservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater wore. Lennon, embarrassingly shortsighted, wore glasses only offstage—and then only when necessary—until 1966. And Holly wore those thin Texas neckties atop his politely buttoned shirts. He made no attempt to mimic Presley’s suave hip movements. If he sounded awkward on record, his stage presence was positively stiff—and yet oddly self-possessed, as if his innate, wiry physicality had panache all its own.

  Like Presley’s, Holly’s singles quickly crossed over to R&B charts, with a strong appeal to black listeners. The Crickets played Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ salacious “Work with Me Annie.” Both Holly and Presley, two lily-white Southern boys, effortlessly won over black listeners with their own style—a feat that eluded Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, for example.

  On top of all this, Holly toyed with his medium in more elaborate and self-conscious ways than Presley. Long before multitrack recording machines became standard, Holly added voices or instruments to tape by simply rolling the existing tape as a backdrop and performing live on top of it—duetting with his voice via tape recorder. “Words of Love,” the only Holly song the Beatles recorded, had drums, bass, rhythm guitar, and a vocal before Holly added lead guitar and two more vocal lines on top of it. “By the time the recording was completed,” wrote John Goldrosen and John Beecher, “the drumming had receded into the background, providing a distant, rolling rhythm which can be felt and heard but does not obscure the vocal or guitar patterns. Similarly, recording the vocal last gave the song a close, intimate feeling, by placing the vocal in front of the varying guitar patterns.”11

  Another defining feature of Holly’s appeal to Lennon was almost invisible; it was described by Holly’s friend and touring companion Phil Everly, who watched the men file into the audience after the girls. “As it progressed to the evening, it filled up with men and if you were getting a lot of girl reaction, like screams and things, it would start to wane. You had to really deliver when the men got there. . . . Buddy Holly was an exception—he would go over more on those evenings when there was a bigger male audience.”12

  Lennon’s insecurities would be tweaked onstage by standing next to McCartney, Central Casting’s ideal Matinee Idol. Taking Holly’s cue, Lennon turned male anxiety into a central theme. He became obsessed with Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day.” Judy helped him learn Holly’s song, displaying “endless patience” until he “managed to work out all the chords,” he later said. “She was a perfectionist. She made me go right through it over and over again until I had it right. I remember her slowing down the record so that I could scribble out the words. First hearing Buddy absolutely knocked me for a loop. . . . And to think it was my own mother who was turning me on it all,” Lennon marveled.13

  Holly’s chart action wedged a creative infinity into two years, from 1957 up to his plane crash on February 3, 1959. British listeners were among his most fervent fans. Lennon always regretted missing Holly’s only tour of England, in March 1958, when he passed through Liverpool for two shows at Philharmonic Hall. But there’s a good chance Lennon caught Holly singing “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Oh Boy!” on TV at Pete Shotton’s, on either Saturday Night at the London Palladium or the BBC’s Off the Record. Liverpool classmate Tony Bramwell recalls the years of ribbing he took from the Quarrymen for winning a school prize and attending both of Holly’s Liverpool shows, and shaking Holly’s hand in between sets.14 From the moment “That’ll Be the Day” entered the British charts, Lennon followed the rest of Holly’s career, from his split with the Crickets to his last recordings with “pop” strings. Holly didn’t just develop, he made the idea of a self-contained act meaningful. Even singing songs written by other people (like “Oh Boy!,” “Rave On,” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”), Holly turned in defining work that extended and enlarged his persona.

  As Holly’s star rose, Elvis Presley got a crew cut and joined the army. Rock ’n’ roll began extending its early explosive impact into a long-running style, carried forward in unpredictable ways by each new performer. With Holly, the outsider as insider, Lennon identified with a whole new concept of how sound m
ight counter image. In a letter to a Holly fan much later, Lennon wrote, “He made it O.K. to wear glasses. I was Buddy Holly.”15

  McCartney already had a notebook with original song lyrics and chord changes when he met Lennon. Since he didn’t know how to write music on a staff, he sketched out lyrics with chords to remind him of their melodies. When McCartney showed up at his first Quarrymen rehearsal, drummer Colin Hanton remembers him spouting ideas: “He set right in telling me how to play and what to do. There was no shyness about him.” Once he joined the Quarrymen, his notebook began bulging with titles, ideas that he and Lennon worked on, embryos of the Lennon-McCartney catalog: “I Lost My Little Girl,” “That’s My Woman,” “Thinking of Linking,” “Years Roll Along,” “Keep Looking That Way,” “Just Fun,” and “Too Bad About Sorrows”—efforts that mixed the derivative with the yet-to-come, the soft products of McCartney’s pre-Lennon imagination. And with his new partner, the list began to sprout instrumentals: one called “Looking Glass” (perhaps a product of Lennon’s early love of Alice in Wonderland) and another named “Winston’s Walk” (spoofing Lennon’s middle name).

  From this repository of ideas, McCartney and Lennon produced the first songs that listeners would soon recognize as Beatle material, difficult to date precisely, but somewhere between their meeting in 1957 and their first trip to Hamburg in 1960: “One After 909,” “Hello Little Girl,” “When I’m Sixty-four,” “Hot as Sun,” “Catswalk,” and McCartney’s most harmonically ambitious early work, “I’ll Follow the Sun.” This suggests McCartney already had some writing chops Lennon had yet to form, and that he may have mentored his new partner early on. Some of these songs seemed to write themselves, and were finished off quickly; others were toted around and tinkered with for years. Most significantly, the songs veered between tightly bound duets (“One After 909”) and individual numbers (McCartney’s “When I’m Sixty-four”), a pendulum set swinging between Lennon and McCartney harmonizing together and pursuing separate interests. Their defining duets always traveled this intriguing mix of togetherness and individuality, support and inimitability (“There’s a Place” and “If I Fell” on through to “Eight Days a Week” and “Don’t Let Me Down”). The existing evidence points to McCartney’s lead in this solo vein. Many of these early notebooks have been lost—but not accidentally thrown away by Jane Asher, as reported by some.