by Peter Brown
Julia’s influence on him also showed at school. He grew more violent and contemptuous of authority, and the calls to Mimi from the school masters came almost every day now. Frequent canings seemed to have no effect on him. He was thin but tall and strong, and his strength was fueled by a ferocious temper. One day an argument with a school master erupted into a fistfight. John so easily overpowered the teacher in front of the other students that the man never reported the incident to the school authorities. Eventually John was suspended from school for a week, which was considered to be the harshest and most shameful punishment short of expelling him. Yet when he returned to school the following Monday, nothing changed. At sixteen he failed all his O levels, the examination everyone in his age group took to determine whether they would continue their education, and by his final year he was last in his class of twenty.
His academic career seemed finished until in his fifth and final year Mimi managed to wrangle a half-hearted letter of recommendation from Mr. Pobjoy, the headmaster, who wrote that John was “not beyond redemption and could possibly turn out to be a fairly responsible adult who might go far.” Pobjoy even arranged for an interview for John at the Liverpool Art College. Drawing seemed to be the only subject John was interested in, although Mr. Pobjoy didn’t intend to inform the admissions board at the art college that John had failed his art final by drawing a grotesque hunchback with bleeding warts to illustrate the theme of “travel.” Much to John’s chagrin, Mimi insisted on accompanying him to the art college for his interview, lest he get lost on his own and never arrive. To her great relief, John was accepted for the fall of 1957, and Julia came by to Mendips to celebrate his future as an artist with them.
7
But by that summer it had become clear that John wasn’t interested in his education, or in art, or in his future at all. John’s only interest seemed to be for the American craze called “rock and roll,” a derivative form of black rhythm and blues with a prominent drum beat. In England there was no such thing as rock and roll music on the radio. Indeed, there was no commercial radio in the sense that Americans knew it. While in America there were thousands of competitive radio stations, free to play whatever they pleased, in England the British Broadcasting Corporation controlled the three existing radio stations and their contents. The Home station was regional and featured news, current affairs, and plays, with few musical interludes. The Light station played middle-of-the-road music, which was necessarily diversified because of the write-in request programs, like “Family Favorites.” However, the musician’s union carefully clocked the amount of “needle time,” or prerecorded music, that was allowed on each program, so that live musicians were hired to play old standards. The third station, Classical, featured only serious talk shows and classical music.
For John Lennon in Liverpool there were only two ways to hear rock and roll. One was from records that the young men who worked on the shipping lines would bring back from America with them; the other was Radio Luxembourg, a privately owned commercial radio station with a signal strong enough to reach most of central Europe and Great Britain. Each night at eight o’clock there would be “English service,” during which the English record companies would buy blocks of air time to showcase their product. John would listen to English service every night on a cheap wireless in his bedroom, galvanized by the faint, crackling sounds of rock and roll.
Then, three important musical incidents seemed to happen all in a row. First was a fad that gripped England in 1956 called “skiffle.” A form of the American washboard and tin-can band, anyone with a metal washboard or old chest could play skiffle. The song that started it all, the “Rock Island Line,” sung in a high-pitched wail by a young man named Lonnie Donegan, became a teenage anthem. Next came a movie about American juvenile delinquents called Blackboard Jungle. Not only did the movie romanticize teen rebellion in general, but the title song, “Rock Around the Clock,” was unlike anything ever heard before in Great Britain. Sung by a plump and balding middle-aged man named Bill Haley, there was a driving wildness to the music that John found almost narcotic. Finally, came the musical and physical embodiment of rock and roll, the first rock star. He was not a father figure like Bill Haley but a teenager, the essence of young lust and rebellion fused with the new music. His song was called “Heartbreak Hotel,” and his name was Elvis Presley.
Elvis. Elvis. Elvis. Elvis! It was all anybody heard at Mendips or at Julia and Twitchy’s flat. Elvis’ hair, his clothing, his swagger, and, most of all, his guitar. Mimi couldn’t bear it after a few weeks. “Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.”
John wanted a guitar more than anything he had ever wanted before in his life. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Julia who broke down and bought it for him, it was Mimi who marched him to a music shop in Whitechapel and bought him his first guitar for £17. Once he got it in his hands, he wouldn’t put it down. A small, Spanish model with cheap wire strings, he played it continuously until his fingers bled. Julia taught him some banjo chords she had learned from Fred, and he started with those. He sat on the bed all day, and when Mimi tried to shoo him into the sunlight, he’d go out to the sunporch and lean up against the brick wall practicing his guitar for so long that Mimi thought he’d rub part of the brick away with his behind. She watched him waste hour after hour, day after day with the damned thing and regretted having bought it for him. “The guitar’s all very well, John,” she warned him, “but you’ll never make a living out of it.”
John’s first group was called the Quarrymen, after his high school. In it were his neighborhood chums Pete Shotton, Nigel Whalley, and Ivan Vaughan, along with various other schoolboys who came in and out. The Quarrymen, although they sported calling cards that announced “Open for Engagements,” as if they expected to be paid, were happy to play wherever there was an audience to listen to them. They appeared in numerous competitions that were being held throughout the city and at high-school dances. They played on the backs of flatbed trucks at street fairs and at church dances and fetes. It was to one of those church fetes on a hot Saturday afternoon, on July 6, 1957, at St. Peter’s Parish Church in Woolton, that Ivan Vaughan invited a school friend named Paul McCartney. Young McCartney—he was just fourteen at the time—didn’t come because he was interested in hearing the Quarrymen; he came because Ivan Vaughan had convinced him that the fete would be a great place to pick up girls.
James Paul McCartney was already picking up girls at this age. He had been interested in girls, he once said proudly, for as long as he could remember. At fifteen he had already lost his baby fat and had developed into a pretty, doe-eyed, self-styled sex symbol. At fifteen, when he lost his virginity with a trusting young lady from school, he told everybody about it the next day and scandalized the poor girl. Girls were his major concern and that was what he was thinking about that day in 1956 as he rode his bicycle to the large field at the top of the church road, where the fete was already underway. He was dressed in a wide-lapeled white sports coat that came down to mid-thigh and black drainpipe trousers. A greasy pompadour was combed into a formidable wave above his forehead.
The fete had started with a parade through the streets, after which there was a carnival with makeshift stalls selling homemade cakes and kidney pies, a demonstration by a team of trained police dogs from the Liverpool police force, and entertainment by a local band called the Quarrymen. Paul watched and listened to Ivan Vaughan’s childhood chums play from a distance.
Later in the afternoon, in the coolness of the church hall, Paul borrowed a guitar from one of the boys and started showing off with it. In the ranks of his immediate audience, Paul was clearly a virtuoso. The boys were particularly impressed, not only because he played so well, but because he knew how to tune a guitar, a talent that so far none of them had been able to master. Just by listening to the radio, he was able to learn all the chords and lyrics of the most popular songs, including “Twenty Flight Rock,” a new favor
ite that was too complicated for the others to figure out. He also sang precisely on key, in a sweet, easy voice, able to hit high notes as effortlessly as a choir boy. As he played “Twenty Flight Rock” for them, his fingers flying through the difficult guitar sequence, he became aware of a drunken old man leaning over him, breathing beery breath on him. When Paul looked up into the man’s face, he realized it wasn’t an old man at all, but a boy not much more than sixteen. Somebody said, “This is John.”
He’s drunk, Paul thought, but only said, “Hi.”
John was grudgingly impressed with Paul’s guitar expertise but was too proud to admit it. While he watched Paul he thought, “He’s half as good as me.” Paul, magnanimous as always, offered to write out all the words to “Twenty Flight Rock” and to Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop a Lula” so that John could learn them. A few days later Paul was riding his bicycle home across the Allerton golf course when he ran into Pete Shotton. “Hey,” Shotton called after him. “They say they’d quite like to have you in the band if you’d like to join.”
8
There was some precedent in the McCartney household for Paul’s musical ability as well as his amorous preoccupations. Paul’s father, James McCartney, was a swinging bachelor and musician himself until he got married at thirty-nine. Although Jim supported himself during the day as a salesman at the Cotton Exchange before the war, at nights and on weekends he was the leader of a popular Liverpool swing band called the Jim Mac Jazz Band. He gave it up only because his false teeth interfered with his trumpet playing. In 1941 Jim married Mary Patricia Mohin, a good Irish Catholic girl who was a trained nurse and midwife. She was thirty-two when she married James and immediately became pregnant with her first child. Jim, exempt from the service because of a hearing problem, went to work at an aircraft engine factory when the war closed the Cotton Exchange. His evenings were spent on “fire watch” during the nightly bombings, and that’s where he was on the night of June 18, 1942, when James Paul McCartney was born at the Walton General Hospital. Mary, who had once been the head nurse of the maternity ward, was given a private room and VIP treatment. When Jim was ushered into the room to see his newborn son for the first time, the baby was red and bloody and screaming, and Jim thought he was “like a horrible piece of red meat.” When Jim got home from the hospital that night he cried for the first time in years. He soon got over it, however, and a second son, Michael, was born in 1944. After the war Jim left his engine factory job for a position with the Corporation Cleansing Department as an inspector, which meant he followed the dustmen around in the streets to make sure they were cleaning up properly.
At first they lived in Anfield in a furnished room, then in a council house in Knowsley Estate, Wallasey, and then moved to Speke, six miles from Liverpool center, to another council house that was rent-free in return for Mary’s midwife chores at the local housing development medical facility. It was from this house on Ardwick Road that Paul started Stockton Wood Road primary school and then with his younger brother Michael went to Joseph Williams Primary School. Finally, when Paul was thirteen they moved again, this time to a slightly better neighborhood in Allerton, at 20 Forthlin Road. Just across the golf course, a little over a mile away, lived Mimi Smith and her nephew John Lennon.
Paul was a good student, well-behaved, and an unabashed apple polisher. He learned early the value of good public relations and began to develop a canny sense of diplomacy. When it was to his benefit, he was easily insincere. In 1953 he was accepted at the Liverpool Institute, the city’s best free high school. Founded in 1825 as a mechanics institute, it now shared the same blackened sandstone building with the Liverpool Art College.
The summer of 1955 Paul and Michael went to Boy Scout camp, where it rained nearly all week. Mary and Jim, concerned that the boys would be wet in their tents, drove to visit them with dry clothes and a ground sheet. On the way home in the car Mary was in such terrible pain she had to lie down. For several months she had felt a small lump in her breast but had avoided seeing the doctor, thinking it was only a symptom of menopause, but this night the pain was unbearable. Later that evening, as Olive Johnson, a close friend of Jim’s from work, helped put her to bed, Mary whispered, “I don’t want to leave the boys just yet.” A few weeks later she was operated on for breast cancer at the old city Northern Hospital, but it was much too late. Hours after the operation she was dead.
Upon hearing of his mother’s death, the first thing Paul said was, “What are we going to do without her money?” The boys cried themselves to sleep that night. For months after, Paul prayed that somehow God would change his mind and send his mother back.
He adjusted, at least on the surface, extremely well. Within a few months of his mother’s death, the skiffle craze started, and Paul was able to bury some of the pain of the loss in what soon became an obsession for him. As it had for so many Liverpool boys, Lonnie Donegan’s Liverpool appearance sparked Paul’s desire for a guitar. Jim McCartney somehow found the money to purchase one for £15. Like John, once Paul had it in his hands he couldn’t put it down. At first he found the instrument almost impossible to play. Then he made a startling discovery; although he was right-handed in most everything else, he played the guitar better with his left hand. He took the guitar back to the store, had it restrung, and began to pick out tunes almost by instinct. Elvis and the Everly Brothers became his idols, and he learned to play all their songs and mimic their styles. His Little Richard imitation was hysterically perfect, and one summer at Butlin’s Holiday Camp he talked his brother Michael into entering the amateur talent contest with him. They didn’t win, but Paul discovered how much he liked playing for an audience and the sound of applause. It wasn’t long after that he met John Lennon.
9
Paul and John formed a close camaraderie, unusual for boys that age. The two-year age difference, which at first seemed insurmountable to them, melted away in their mutual interests and similarities, although on the surface the two boys couldn’t have been more different. Baby-faced Paul was self-righteous, conscientious, and deferential to his elders. John defied authority, was hedonistic, amoral, and enjoyed his role as the outspoken iconoclast.
It was to their mutual delight that Paul’s Liverpool Institute and John’s Art College were in adjoining buildings. Now it was easy for John to find an accomplice in playing hookey from school, and the two of them spent long afternoons together at Paul’s house on Forthlin Road, practicing songs, teaching each other chords, and raiding the pantry for jam “butties.” Sometimes they’d play standing in the tub in the tiled bathroom to get a better echo. Their voices complemented each other perfectly, with Paul’s sweet, round tones softening the edges of John’s strained nasality. The harmony they produced, an intertwining that seemed to melt into a third, unheard voice, was lovely. An affectionate songwriting competition developed between them, one they would use to fuel their creative spirit for years to come. One day Paul played for John a song of his own composition, and John improvised one on the spot so as not to be topped. Although they composed together for only the first year or two, they wrote over 100 songs that first year.2 John found that it was easy for him to compose the beginning melody for a song, but he got stuck for a transition and a break. Paul had a special facility for writing the “middle eight” bars. Paul’s mellow, pretty melodies in turn complemented John’s strident rock riffs. On those first afternoons in Paul’s living room, it seemed like the pieces of a vast puzzle were falling into place, completing a picture that neither of them had been able to see clearly before.
As soon as Paul became a member of the Quarrymen he had a lot to say about their music. Characteristically, he started to tell the other band members how to play and when. What’s more, he wanted to play lead guitar, which a bespectacled boy named Eric Griffiths was playing at the time. Paul badgered Griffiths until he quit, then moved into his spot. Even Pete Shotton, one of John’s oldest and most loyal mates, felt a bit put out at John’s constant acquiescence to Pa
ul’s demands. When Shotton saw the writing on the wall was writ by Paul’s hand, he good-naturedly left the group, as did Ivan Vaughan. They were replaced with other, ever-changing musicians who played around the Lennon-McCartney core.
As far as John’s Aunt Mimi was concerned, Paul McCartney was fuel to the fires that would burn John in hell. Paul’s sweet persona and feckless public relations didn’t fool her. It was plain to see how Paul wasted John’s time with the guitar, and any boy who would dress like a Ted, with skintight pants and those awful, pastel-colored shirts, couldn’t be worth his salt. Paul would come to the front door of Mendips on his bicycle, asking for John. “Hello, Mimi. Can I come in?”
“No, you certainly cannot,” Mimi would say.
By the following summer of 1958, at the end of John’s first year at art school, the fighting with Mimi at Mendips became onerous. Since she had paid for his first year of school out of her savings, until he could qualify for a government loan, she felt more justified than ever in having a say in how he dressed, whom he saw, and where he went. The Quarrymen were viewed with absolute and total disapproval. When Mimi’s nagging became too much for him, John would simply escape to Julia’s house in Spring Wood. Julia’s became a refuge for him. She loved the Quarrymen and even knew the words to their songs. John began to leave his Teddy Boy outfits at Julia‘s, so Mimi wouldn’t see them, and then stop at Julia’s house to change clothes on the way to school every morning. If John and Mimi had an especially bad row, he would storm out the door and stay overnight at Julia’s, sleeping on the sofa. This hurt Mimi so much—and made her so angry—that she once gave away the household pet, a little dog named Sally that John adored, saying that with John gone there’d be no one around Mendips to walk it.