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

by Tim Riley

  Sutcliffe went to Hamburg ahead of the others on March 15, 1961, to be with Astrid. He had been elected ambassador to the police: down at the station, he smoothed over the Beatles’ return. He wrote the others: “The lifting of a deportation ban is only valid for 1 year, then you can have it renewed. One thing they made clear, if you have any trouble with the Police, no matter how small, you’ve had it forever. (Drunkenness, fighting, women etc.)”2 But during this thirteen-week engagement at the Top Ten Club, Sutcliffe finally decided to leave the band. After struggling with the others to rise up through Hamburg’s stages, Sutcliffe was drawn back into art by Astrid, and paintings began pouring out of him. This itself was loss enough for Lennon, and Pauline Sutcliffe detailed letters from her brother describing how troubled John was by Stu’s circling back to art. Although his paintings are now dubbed merely “promising,” Sutcliffe was a born painter; he couldn’t put down his brush even when seized by illness.

  But the group’s politics were not neutral. Even Lennon now joined the others when bemoaning Sutcliffe’s bass playing. “Stuart looked miserable onstage—if he turned up . . . ,” Pauline Sutcliffe wrote. “[He] was never going to get any better on bass, for he wasn’t trying. It was all an irritating fanfare in John’s mind, according to Stuart. He said John did not want the aggravation; he wanted to maintain the status quo. But Stuart wanted to go off with Astrid, go off and paint, to leave the Beatles, to desert John.”3

  According to Pauline, Tony Sheridan remarked how much John envied Stuart’s choices: the band had finally hit some stride, and now a key symbolic member had options even the resolute Lennon sympathized with. “Stuart and John liked to spend the day together at the museum, where they talked about all kinds of art,” Astrid Kirchherr remembers. John and Stuart discussed the idea of them both leaving the Beatles and picking up their studies at art school back in Liverpool, Pauline wrote. But for Lennon this would have meant giving up the weekly cash and the sexual perks, a manner of living he had grown attached to. Letting go of Sutcliffe meant another wrenching loss, just three years after Julia’s accident—this one to a beautiful fiancée and promising art career. Even more than McCartney, Sutcliffe was someone who would confront Lennon with his flaws and push back at his flashes of cruelty.

  “They knew Paolozzi’s work in pop art, and Stuart was very excited to meet him,” Kirchherr recalls.4 Paolozzi represented a huge leap from Sutcliffe’s Liverpool Art College training. There, he was a big fish in a provincial pond. At his new digs, he got to study with a leading European artist who had made a splash with his nervy collages of consumer images, seeds of what became known as pop art.5 The underside of Sutcliffe’s big break stoked Lennon’s envy: if his best friend knew himself well enough to make the right choice, Lennon’s options seemed less clear. And while Kirchherr denies it, Lennon must have had a crush on her, like everybody else did. Sutcliffe had a strong enough ego around his art to choose it as a career. In Sutcliffe’s blonde fiancée, and his new passion for visual work, Lennon likely saw a more developed version of himself. His best friend had suddenly sprinted out ahead in life.

  Complicated by the strides the Beatles were making onstage, it must have seemed harshly ironic to Lennon that his best friend from art school, whom he had recruited into rock ’n’ roll, was now stepping off stage back to the painting for which Lennon first admired him. As described by Pauline, Lennon’s reaction measures the strength of his feelings:

  Late one evening it all got out of control. It was John at his most random. He and Stuart were talking in the street in Hamburg and suddenly Stuart was lying on the pavement having been punched by John. He had no time to even attempt to protect himself. The brakes were not working for John and he was taken over by one of his uncontrollable rages: he kicked out at Stuart again and again and kicked him in the head. There was blood streaming down from Stuart’s head when John finally came to his senses. John looked down at Stuart—and fled, disgusted and terrified by his attack. He could not confront what he had done.6

  In Pauline’s account, McCartney witnessed this episode, incapable of intervening in this sudden, inexplicable burst of violence. As the Beatles took over Lennon’s life, finishing Liverpool Art College seemed pointless. Everybody knew the move was right for Stuart, even though it scrambled the group. The unforeseen consequence of this move, one of rock ’n’ roll’s great tricks of fate, happened almost invisibly: McCartney drew the short straw and picked up Sutcliffe’s bass.

  The summer of 1961 set Lennon’s art vs. music dilemma against Cold War tensions that leapt into space. John F. Kennedy took the presidential oath in January, created the Peace Corps in March, sent five hundred “military advisors” to Vietnam in May, and met Nikita Khrushchev at a Vienna summit in June. Also in May, the first Freedom Riders descended from their bus in Jackson, Mississippi, and were promptly arrested for “disturbing the peace.” As London erected its 581-foot Post Office Tower, Berlin built its Wall. The first manned spaceship orbited the earth, with the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin, in April. America’s Alan Shepard followed in May, prompting Kennedy to announce an unimaginable goal: a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

  The Beatles hit the Cavern stage in July for a routine that turned them into a house act: lunchtime sets let them hit outlying areas for evening slots. More listeners started showing up, and their dogged work soon brought them sweeping local stature by word of mouth. Lunchtime queues snaked around lower downtown’s winding alleyways, and the venue emerged as a temple, a sweaty shrine, a contagion of hopes writhing amid a sardine scene of hormones.

  A swarthy, genial bouncer named Paddy Delaney presided over the Cavern crowd, his gate funneling beehives and their boyfriends down eighteen steep steps into a noisy brick cloister. The Cavern was quite literally a cave divided into six parallel halls, joined at their centers by a spine of seats to form the unlikely shape of a triple cross. The band was jammed onto a wooden platform at the top, holding court at the altar of an adolescent underworld. At any given time, half of the patrons had no sight lines to the band. Those who were there still cherish the Cavern’s heyday, with give-and-take between stage and audience that took on the air of ritual, followed by phone calls to Beatle houses with tomorrow’s song requests. Half-eaten sandwiches topped the band’s bruised amplifiers. During count-offs, lit ciggies got wedged in between guitar strings up by their tuning pegs like candles, and began dipping and swaying with the music.

  The first thing Cavern regulars talk about is the smell: the highest hurdle the music cleared was how it redeemed the stench. A former vegetable warehouse, the Cavern sat atop an underground water system built during the nineteenth century as a storage house for dock shipments. Several aromas competed for dominance: distant cabbage remnants, human perspiration, spilled soda, and leftover snacks, all mingled with the overhang from a nightly Clorox scrub. Humidity seeped up from the underground waterways. Cokes and jam butties (butter sandwich squares) were the meager fare, and the drench gave patrons mononucleosis (the “kissing disease”). More than one Cavern regular remembers the walls seeming to sweat; and the beads of perspiration that seeped through McCartney’s shirts during the opening numbers signaled a fierce musical commitment: music poured out of the Beatles like laughter, and the crowd roared back as if tickled. Local employers scowled at all the typists and mail boys who returned to their downtown offices drenched and dizzy.

  The Beatles began to rule the Whitechapel district, logging more than two hundred Cavern sets during 1961 and 1962 while shuttling around regional dance halls and churches at night. Bill Harry started Mersey Beat to track all the groups, filling a newspaper devoted to a scene that by his count numbered between 300 and 350 bands, a number that locals still inflate to 400 or 500—this in a metropolis that was over 700,000 but in a slow, steady decline since wartime. Mersey Beat’s first issue, dated July 6, 1961, featured Lennon’s now-famous essay “Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles—Translated from the John Lennon” (�
�A man came with a flaming pie and said/You Shall be Beatles with an ‘A’ . . .”). “[Lennon] was so delighted he gave me everything he’d ever written,” Harry recalled, “about 250 poems, stories, drawings, and I used them as a column called Beatcomber.”7 Harry remembered Lennon dropping off scads of paper, teeming with verbal cartoons and cackling wordplay, reminiscent of his Daily Howl material. A lot of this wound up in his first collection, In His Own Write, which Penguin scrambled to put out in 1964. The rest was inadvertently thrown away by Harry’s girlfriend during an office move.

  As Harry ran Lennon’s “prose,” Lennon dashed off running jokes in the personals section, updating his Daily Howl with more absurdist darts at British propriety: royalty, politicians, establishment showbiz. Interspersed among the typical Mersey entreaties for guitarists, scattershot localisms knocked up against randy innuendo: “Accrington welcomes Hot Lips and Red Nose. Whistling Jock Lennon wishes to contact Hot Nose. Red Scunthorpe wishes to jock Hot Accrington.” History wonders at the secret nicknames and private jokes embedded throughout.8

  Lennon’s “Beatcomber” column was more of the same, with a guide to the local clubs doubling as a razor combing finer gradations of “cool.” Exploding gags mixed with shaggy-dog punch lines to ridiculous effect, as though Lennon couldn’t resist stringing his readers along for the sheer effrontery of his noodling:

  The Jackarandy—Membrains only. . . . La Matumba—For a cheap heal. . . . The Dodd Spot—Watch out for details.9

  Who knows how many inside jokes mock history in such lines.

  And “Small Sam,” which never made it into Lennon’s books, reads like the inspiration for the running tall-vs.-short gag that screenwriter Alun Owen nabbed for manager Norm and roadie Shake in A Hard Day’s Night. In Lennon’s micro-fable, Stan (sic), though small, is “highly regarded,” but one day Stan “saw an adverse” in the “Mersey Bean” for “quickly grow your boots.” Now the passers-by all remark on Stan’s footwear: “Is not that small Stan wearing a pair of those clubs you quickly grow you boots?’ And it is.” 10

  Cavern patrons remember Lennon improvising such word fizzle from the stage. The Goons were the most obvious influence, with a head writer like Spike Milligan, whose Silly Verse for Kids (1958) and Dustbin of Milligan (1961) had found popularity as books. He’d also spawned a second BBC show, called The Idiot Weekly. But there were other sources: Stanley Unwin, the radio comic from Pretoria, had come out with his LP Rotatey Diskers with Unwin (1960) and his book The Miscillian Manuscript (1961), which offered up a similar mashed English, which he called “Unwinese” and everybody else called “gobbledygook.” In time, Lennon gave musical color to his verbal dexterity (“I Am the Walrus,” “I Dig a Pony”), but on the Cavern stage, his macho, tough-guy stance played off of his wordplay. He was goaded in this pursuit by Wooler, who was an unbearable punster, always on the prowl for catchy ways to introduce the acts at “the best of cellars.” Coming from his haughty frame, his feet firmly planted, knees bent for an up-and-down swagger, Lennon’s tart verbal riffs offset his musical arrogance.

  The Beatles’ stature as Liverpool’s reigning scenesters was crowned by a towering set list. Lennon and McCartney’s range and reach of material mushroomed to the point where they seemed to know every song worth knowing, and a few more each time out. The roughly 150 numbers that Mark Lewisohn lists for 1961 would come to be seen as an essential rock catalog that framed Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent together with the Olympics, the Coasters, and UK players like the Vipers (London skifflers) and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates (who scored with the low-rumble Goth of “Shakin’ All Over” in June of 1960).

  Paul McCartney had become Lennon’s staunch musical sounding board and writing partner, in his front room at Allerton Road or in the vestibule at Mendips. Paul’s younger brother, Mike, took pictures of the two hunched over their guitars, which jutted out in opposite directions, writing down words and chords in their notebooks. The more they wrote, the more the music posed riddles too good not to solve. By this point, they had worked at least sixteen originals into their set list, including Lennon singing “Hello Little Girl,” the duet on “One After 909,” McCartney doing “Like Dreamers Do,” “Love of the Loved,” and “Hold Me Tight,” and some stray instrumentals (Harrison’s “Cry for a Shadow” got recorded in Germany, but “Winston’s Walk” and “Looking Glass” never made it to the studio). So as early as this, their own songs counted more heavily than any other songwriter’s, including Chuck Berry (the most covered, with eleven), Buddy Holly (nine), Carl Perkins (nine), Larry Williams (eight), and Leiber and Stoller (eight). They fiddled with their own numbers constantly. (“Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me,” once considered two of their earliest tunes, weren’t written until 1962.)11

  The band’s repertoire stretched all the way back to Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” the 1946 number which George still played, but cut a wide swath through rock ’n’ roll, R&B, C&W, and pop, even if the usual heavyweights cast long shadows: Elvis Presley was the performer they most covered, with fifteen songs based on his recordings, including “Mean Woman Blues,” which Jerry Lee Lewis covered the same year as the King, 1957. Carl Perkins ranked second with eleven numbers, and another telling overlap: “Blue Suede Shoes” has two famous versions, Perkins’s original wayward pass and the King’s touchdown interception; it was a bit as if Perkins turned an insult into a hook and lobbed it to Elvis, whose wild-eyed sprint dodged comparisons to reveal the song’s cockeyed philosophy. Then came Chuck Berry (eleven), Buddy Holly (nine), Larry Williams, Little Richard, and Lonnie Donegan with six each (although most of Donegan’s stuff had probably dropped out of their sets by 1961), and the Coasters, Eddie Cochran, and Jerry Lee Lewis at five numbers each.

  Among both the performers and the songwriters whose output the Beatles covered, Berry stood out, and not just because to many critics he ranks as the all-time great rock ’n’ roller. Along with Buddy Holly’s, his was the career Lennon and McCartney most admired. Even Berry’s jail stint burnished his subversive prestige. His open-grill burgers, drive-in diners, and teenage cruisers were nothing if not all-American, but Lennon’s genius located the universal pleasure impulse in Berry’s writing and animated it as his own. Nearly every Mersey band had some Berry numbers in their set, but Lennon would be the UK’s answer to Chuck Berry, and his songwriting hero’s best interpreter.

  As much as Lennon admired Berry, he placed him inside a larger frame. The great St. Louis duck-walker would never have picked up on some of the numbers this troupe specialized in: movie stuff like “The Third Man Theme” (a Lennon harmonica solo), Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again,” and “Over the Rainbow” (based on Gene Vincent’s version);12 “Maggie Mae,” the Liverpool sea shanty that became a Vipers hit in 1957 (produced by George Martin); “Summertime,” the Gershwin standard from Porgy and Bess; and Ray Charles’s “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.” Lennon, who sang eight out of their eleven Chuck Berry songs, also plucked “You Win Again,” the Hank Williams song done by Jerry Lee Lewis, and “Fools Like Me”—country stuff that would have gotten laughed out of most London pubs. A growing musical confidence meant a willingness to embrace the strange, the foreign, and the downright wacky. To Lennon’s ear, Berry was among the more inventive and direct writers in a larger continuum.

  Learning this material was as simple as hitting the NEMS music store on Whitechapel, just up the block from the Cavern and the White Grapes pub across the street, ogling the latest singles, and monopolizing a listening booth where John and Paul could scribble lyrics. The cost came in stern looks from the buttoned-down manager, but only when he descended from his office to work the floor. (There were rumors about him anyway.) At the rate they were going, on a good week they could harvest between five and ten songs from stylus to stage: cadging verse, learning chords, then working out intros, transitions, and vocal harmonies back home. The following top forty hits from 1960 quickly entered the
ir sets: “I Just Don’t Understand,” Ann-Margret’s lingering pout, which Paul adapted; “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” by the Olympics (better known for “Hully Gully” and “Well . . . [Baby Please Don’t Go]”); and “New Orleans,” by Gary U.S. Bonds.

  The NEMS shop was a song bank, and their education amounted to an advanced degree in rock music history, before there was such a thing. Simply by sponging all their favorite sounds up together, Lennon and McCartney skilled themselves in both writing and recorded sound, and began to frame the music inside their own higher tastes and guilty pleasures. All of it fed an ambition to write, even if the few songs emerging at this point felt strained and awkward; their appetite could barely keep up with their obsession. Like playing, where new songs gave them new ideas about ensemble, this feverish listening and thieving took root in ways they couldn’t predict, stoking a songwriting muse that simmered for another year or more before boiling over with tunes. They paid back the interest on their NEMS account when its high-flown store manager, the neatly tailored square with the precious smile, finally took notice.