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

by Tim Riley

  Anyway, the music was simply a prelude; the fight often became the main event. In this intensely working-class culture, throwing fists was a defining behavior of budding manhood, where a wrong look could get you a shiner. One evening in Prescot, Lancashire, the band won such crowd response during the first set that the manager opened up the bar for them and promised them more steady work. It was a big mistake: the second set degenerated into too much drink, with Lennon heckling both manager and audience from the stage. Colin Hanton, tired of Lennon’s loutish inclinations, hauled his kit off the bus on the way home, never to return. He couldn’t tell which was worse: the self-defeating carousing or the lost shot at some prime bookings. It was the beginning of the band’s drummer’s curse.

  Lennon and McCartney were always on the make for gigs. At the Jacaranda coffee bar, where students gabbed into the night, they pestered Allan Williams, who still had the steel-drum band playing in his joint: why not some rock ’n’ roll? He hired the band briefly for engagements at his new strip club, the Blue Angel, originally called the Wyvern Social Club. Meanwhile at the end of 1959, Sutcliffe won a painting award from more than two thousand entries, for a piece called Summer Painting, from John Moores, the Liverpool patron. Early in 1960, Lennon and McCartney persuaded him to spend his prize money, sixty-five pounds, for a deposit on rock’s least glamorous instrument, the electric bass. With the others pressing him, Sutcliffe went to Hessy’s on Whitechapel and purchased a Höfner bass guitar—the hollow-bodied, violin-shaped brand McCartney would make famous. Sutcliffe had been cultivating his own major rock ’n’ roll fixation—his sister describes his Elvis obsession—and seemed genuinely torn between painting and the musical thrills Lennon coaxed out of him. “We were an Elvis family,” Pauline Sutcliffe writes, “although we were also keen on Billy Fury and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates (‘Shakin All Over’).”14 Hanton’s departure had left the group drummerless. Now they could at least boast of a bassist, and with the borrowed PA equipment from the art college, they had some semblance of a unit. “The rhythm’s in the guitars,” they kept insisting.

  Sutcliffe’s hallowed status at the art college had shaped a mystique around him. His moody-painter pose, his sheer attitude, attracted Lennon almost as much as the paintings themselves; it was as if both of them discovered how similar sensibilities could be conveyed through different mediums, guitar and canvas. These motives were tangled for Lennon: while his best friend would necessarily be a member of his musical group (and get talked into spending money on equipment), Sutcliffe’s friendship outweighed the musical partnership, which eventually would cause a bitter falling-out. Lennon, branching out from his drawings and cartoons, began sponging off his friend as a painting tutor. Cynthia would be “ordered to wait in a corner until these private lessons were over.”15

  Pauline Sutcliffe described a novel Stuart began in this period, where a character named Nhoke is the thinly veiled composite of Lennon and Sutcliffe, “an artist living in horrid rooms in Puke Street.” She remembered how Stuart wrote of the “terrible change in John” in the months after they met, mirroring the loss of his mother: “He was capricious, incalculable and self-centered, yet at the same time he was always a loyal friend. A frustrated and misunderstood child not given its due need of affection ends as a man without roots, in rebellion or bewilderment, almost embittered.”16

  Most Beatle historians claim that Sutcliffe’s verbal and painterly articulacy was absent from his bass playing. Many simplistically conclude that he couldn’t have done that well, too, and that Lennon’s loyalty to him outweighed his musical skills. But this enfeebled musicianship doesn’t jibe with the historical record. Across many stages, to audiences both rapt and oblivious, Sutcliffe regularly performed “Love Me Tender” as a Quarryman. If Sutcliffe’s charisma was “dry,” putting over a contemporary Presley number like that takes pluck, not to say panache. And with his background in church choir and his boyhood piano lessons, there’s good reason to assume he held his own on bass. The musically astute Cavern Club deejay Bob Wooler later argued that “the Beatles carried no passengers”; and in spite of Paul and George’s avid competition for John’s musical attention, Sutcliffe played with the band for just over a year.17

  One way for McCartney and Harrison to badger Lennon was to complain about Sutcliffe’s skill, but it’s just as likely they were clamoring for more of Lennon’s respect. “John and Stuart were top dogs and that was always a problem for Paul and George,” wrote Pauline Sutcliffe, “for they did not feel totally included in everything that was happening.” Lennon’s bond with Stuart was artistic and intellectual, while his friendship with McCartney bridged onstage musical rapport with practical stuff like cadging 45s, deciphering lyrics, and figuring out chords. “Looking back on it now,” McCartney told Pauline Sutcliffe, “I think it was little tinges of jealousy because Stu was John’s friend. There was always a little jealousy among the group as to who would be John’s friend. He was like the guy you aspired to.”18 By most accounts McCartney and Sutcliffe were like oil and water. Again, it speaks to Lennon’s magnetism that they coexisted for as long as they did. Ironically, it’s Sutcliffe’s artier aspect, not anyone’s playing, that seems to have shaped the band—its look, its attitude, its image—as they gained ensemble proficiency. Early on, their growing idea of themselves as Artists, with particular garb and matching attitudes, was ahead of their musicianship, both as individuals and as a group. With Sutcliffe, they latched on to an attitude and nurtured it into a sound.

  There’s a marked lag in live performances between two late Christmas parties in January of 1959, just before Buddy Holly died, and the opening the next August 29 of the Casbah Coffee Club, where the Quarrymen won a regular Saturday slot (and eventually picked up a new drummer). But this lag resembles their 1958 schedule, when by Beatle scholar Mark Lewisohn’s scrupulous count the Quarrymen played only five gigs, with none at all between March and December.19 Despite the gaps between performances, Lennon spent the bulk of his time practicing, learning chords, harmonizing, and writing songs with McCartney, as his studies tarried. In between gigs, his refusal to do anything serious with his art studies was pronounced. The motivating principle to his life was music, right down to the nitty-gritty of where to get gigs and how to snag equipment, combing the charts for new material, immersing himself in the playlists of Radio Luxembourg, and honing his skills on the guitar. As a musician at an art school, his daily interactions brought all kinds of new metaphors into play, and he began to think of rock ’n’ roll as part of a larger story.

  This larger picture started coming into view as the wheels began to spin off some major rock careers. Jerry Lee Lewis’s success crashed into scandal after he married wife number three in December 1957: his cousin, Myra Gale Brown, aged thirteen. (His band swore she was only twelve.) Early the next year, Elvis Presley answered the peacetime draft by joining the army: he was inducted March 24, 1958, and bused from Memphis to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, before getting assigned to the Third Armored Division and shipped to basic training at Fort Hood in Texas. On August 14, Presley’s beloved mother, Gladys, died in Memphis. Julia Stanley’s death dates almost exactly one month earlier.20

  Presley’s teenage glow had such force in Lennon’s mind that he always took the King’s drafting as a de facto enlistment: “Elvis died when he went into the army,” he said as late as 1980.21 At seventeen, he couldn’t square the flashing neon Elvis with the straight-arrow enlisted soldier, who put his rebellion on hold to suit up during peacetime. The press covered it as an event, or a bad omen, as if the music itself might not survive.

  It got worse from there. Early in 1959, after two weeks sleeping on subzero overnight treks in their broken-down tour bus, Buddy Holly chartered a plane and, along with J. P. Richardson (“the Big Bopper”) and Ritchie Valens, raced ahead from Mason City, Iowa, to the Winter Dance Party tour’s next gig, in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson had caught a nasty flu and had begged his seat off Holly’s bass player, Waylon Jennin
gs. “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” Holly told Jennings. “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes,” Jennings shot back. When the plane went down shortly after takeoff in the early hours of February 3, everyone on board perished. Holly’s “Heartbeat” had just entered the British charts. A month later, fans stopped short to hear Holly singing Paul Anka’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” his last record, defying its syrupy strings to create a new, existential subgenre: the posthumous hit.

  The year closed with Chuck Berry’s prison sentence for violating the Mann Act—the same law used to hound heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson decades before. In Berry’s case, a fourteen-year-old Apache prostitute complained to police after he fired her from his St. Louis nightclub.22 With Carl Perkins’s music in disrepair since his 1956 car crash, Little Richard enrolled at a seminary, and others downed by fate, racist persecution, and dumb bad luck, the gods seemed to be frowning on rock’s staying power. Historians invariably describe the period between 1959 and 1963 as “fallow,” which is really a measure of how differently Americans and Britons perceived the style.

  To Liverpool fans, the rock ’n’ roll juggernaut seemed less fallow than tragic. Rockabilly star Gene Vincent bucked and swayed on the new ITV network’s show Boy Meets Girls in December 1959, and soon producer Jack Good imported a pal of Vincent’s, the surly, ferocious Eddie Cochran, who streaked across TV screens in late January and February. Larry Parnes, a well-known London promoter, booked the Cochran-and-Vincent bill for a tour of the UK. Lennon and Sutcliffe caught the show at the Empire in Liverpool in March, and Pauline Sutcliffe remembers that “John was furious—what a colossal irony—when the screams of female fans drowned out his idols.”23

  Soon afterward, Allan Williams contacted Parnes to coproduce a second, even bigger package at Liverpool Stadium in May. (“I could smell money . . . lots of it,” Williams recalled.)24 The bill was slated to include, besides Cochran and Vincent, Peter Wynne, Lance Fortune, Nero and the Gladiators, Cass and the Casanovas, and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes (with a drummer named Ringo Starr). But late on April 16, after scandalizing Bristol’s Hippodrome, Cochran hired a taxi back to London for his flight home. Just before midnight, his driver swerved into a lamppost outside Chippenham, Wiltshire. Cochran’s fiancée, Sharon Sheeley, who had flown over to be with him on her twentieth birthday, suffered a broken pelvis. Gene Vincent survived with broken ribs and collarbone and further harm to an already damaged leg.25 Thrown from the car and suffering severe head injuries, Cochran died the next afternoon at St. Martin’s Hospital in Bath.

  Singer Vince Eager (né Roy Taylor) told biographer Alan Clayson: “Larry Parnes rang to say that I ought to get down to the hospital in Bath, where Eddie was on the danger list. . . . There, the surgeon told me that Eddie was unlikely to survive. I was extremely upset, but when I emerged from the hospital, there was Parnes with the press and half his bloody pop stars, ready for a photo opportunity. I just drove off and refused to speak to Larry, who even before Eddie died had told the newspapers (a) about the ‘irony’ of Eddie’s latest release, ‘Three Steps to Heaven’—which was in fact the B-side then—and (b) that I was off to fly back to America with the coffin.”26 All the same, on May 3 the Liverpool show went on as scheduled, padded out with extra performers. The Quarrymen were there, forced to sit and watch, eager to perform yet still drummerless.

  Cochran’s death had a profound impact on British Invasion rockers, who remember him as a larger presence than most Americans do. “Twenty Flight Rock” was the first song Lennon heard McCartney sing, and by this point they had added Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody,” “Teenage Heaven,” and “I Remember” to their sets. For Lennon, the tragedy struck especially close to home, since he’d just caught Cochran and Vincent’s show at the Empire. This all happened in the shadow of Julia’s accident in the summer of 1958. All of Lennon’s teenage giants had stumbled, strayed, or failed to cheat death: Presley joined the army, Little Richard defected to the pulpit, and the ghost of Buddy Holly whispered, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” “Let us remember that Eddie Cochran died for rock ’n’ roll on the playing fields of England,” Andrew Loog Oldham would write, voicing what Lennon surely felt after catching Cochran’s only British tour.27

  As a manager for Lennon’s group, Allan Williams was a stand-in for Alf Lennon—always scheming for a score. He had coaxed Larry Parnes to hire some of “his” groups to play for the May 3 show, and Parnes was impressed enough with the surging Liverpool beat scene to return the following week to audition support for singers in his stable, whose names blared his show-biz banality: Billy Fury, Johnny Gentle, Duffy Power, and the best-known of these, Tommy Steele. The “Silver Beetles,” a name Sutcliffe first devised, were among the local groups that got the call, recruiting for the occasion a middle–aged drummer, Tommy Moore. Billy Fury, about to launch a short tour, attended the audition at the Wyvern, and he and Parnes offered the booking to Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Moore, urging them to drop Sutcliffe from the lineup. When they refused, Fury hired another band, and the Silver Beetles suffered another rejection.

  But a week later, Parnes called Williams back with work for the group in Scotland, this time backing Johnny Gentle. Everybody dropped his school commitments and headed up to Alloa on May 20, 1960. Lennon skipped his art college exams; McCartney convinced his father that the trip would actually help him prepare for his A-level exams. Moore’s tenure with the band would be even shorter than Hanton’s: he got into a car accident in Scotland and had to race to a show from the hospital, where Lennon had howled at his injuries and insisted he play the gig. Moore quit shortly after the nine-day engagement was through. The band landed back in Liverpool having had a hard-core touring experience that only made them want more. Nobody else seemed to understand why. They eventually played Williams’s new strip venue, the New Cabaret Artist’s Club on Upper Parliament Street. The space was similar to the Jacaranda—a dim basement room with tables. But it sported a singular Liverpool character, the black and mysterious Lord Woodbine, named for his favorite brand of cigarettes, tending bar.

  Hamburg, Germany, became the cultural crucible, the place where the Beatles invented themselves and discovered the riches of investing themselves in nightly work. But the job proved the most far-fetched yet in a string of unlikely breaks. In June the Royal Caribbean Band suddenly disappeared from the Jacaranda, leaving a string of expletives sputtering from Williams’s stocky frame. Word filtered back that they had fled to Hamburg; Williams started getting letters from the band about the scene there. Once again, he smelled a percentage, and he headed across the Channel to check things out.

  Hamburg was Williams’s kind of place. Bands could do stints here, Williams reasoned, send a percentage home, and return with the kind of clubbing experience needed to gain more work. The steel drummers introduced Williams to Bruno Koschmider, owner of a club called the Kaiserkeller. A few months later, by sheer happenstance, he ran into Koschmider again at a London club, where he pitched the band Derry and the Seniors (with saxist Howie Casey). Koshchmider booked them, and within weeks wrote Williams asking for another act. In the meantime, Lennon’s itch to play with words had him tweaking the band’s name again: dropping “Silver” and respelling “Beetles” with an “a” to accentuate the pun on “beat.” Now Williams turned to the Beatles.

  He thought of them for Hamburg as much to shut them up as anything else. But for Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Sutcliffe, Hamburg was a much bigger break than touring Scotland as a backup band. The wages were decent (fifteen pounds a week, more than some of their parents were making), the work was steady, and it validated everything they had been working toward up to that point: the chance to dig down into what they previously had only flirted with in their ensemble, in front of a nightly audience. Of course, these assumptions were naïve; that’s what made them so tempting. They had little idea that the Hamburg they were entering would shape their world from this point on in ways both practical and aesthetic, and a
lter their outlook decisively. But there was a hole to plug before they could go: they still needed a drummer. The answer seemed obvious: since Pete Best had been sitting in with them at his mother’s place, the Casbah, and looked mutable, not to say gullible, they gambled and offered him the slot. Finally, the unsteady ensemble they had steered since Colin Hanton hauled his kit off that bus found some traction.

  Here marks an early turning point in Lennon’s professional identity, where fate and circumstance thrust him into a scene he could barely have imagined for himself before leaving Merseyside. Hamburg calls down through rock history as the great defining stage in Lennon’s public character, a cauldron of noise and rude poetry, raising up his harebrained persona through the music as if hypnotized by some fierce, cackling joke. Only in retrospect can we trace how Lennon’s earlier, more intimate defeats receded into the rearview mirror of a larger, infinitely more seductive musical epic. As he climbed into Williams’s van with the others on August 16, perhaps, at least temporarily, it felt as if such defeats might be left behind, if not redeemed.

  Although Harrison was underage at seventeen, Williams told them simply to flash their driver’s licenses as government IDs and present themselves as tourists. The troupe included Williams’s Chinese wife, Beryl; her brother Barry Chang; and Lord Woodbine, whose rock-star shades gave him the look of distant fortune. Lennon stole a harmonica from a drugstore when they passed through Belgium, and working their way north through the Netherlands, they stopped to pose in front of the Arnhem War Memorial. Tired and bedraggled, the musicians channeled their outrageous ambition into expressions of deadpan calm for Chang’s camera, oblivious to the tombstone’s World War II inscription: THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. Apart from the photographer, one other figure is missing, Lennon. You can almost hear him snoring from the van.