The British language, meanwhile, had been invaded by certain bewildering new words. Of these, the most bewildering was “teenager.” In Britain before 1956 there were no such things as teenagers. There were only children and grown-ups. Transition took place at sixteen when boys put on tweed jackets like their fathers’ and girls turned into matrons with “twinsets” and “perms.” Conscription, or national service, for two years completed the male maturing process. The only remission was given to university students, a minority, who were still largely upper class and thus permitted to behave like hooligans on boat race night and other fixed ceremonial occasions.
But there now stalked the streets of Britain young men in clothes as outlandish as they were sinister. The costume, of velvet-trimmed drape jackets, frilled shirts, and narrow trousers, was inspired partly by Edwardian fashion—hence the name “Teddy Boy”—and partly by gunslingers and riverboat gamblers in Hollywood movies. Amid the drab uniformity of postwar Britain they seemed utterly freakish. Their hair, in a land still army-cropped, was scarcely believable. A greasy cockade flopped over the forehead, swept back past the ears with constant combing to form two flaps like the posterior of a duck. Their socks were luminous pink or orange. Their shoes had soles three inches thick. They were believed to carry weapons such as switchblades, razors, and bicycle chains. Their other, scarcely less threatening, predilection was for coffee bars and “rock ’n’ roll.”
Coffee bars, to the British of 1956, might just as well have been opium dens. They had sprung up all at once out of the country’s Italian population, and also the sudden fifties’ craze for “contemporary” design. They were dark and filled with basket chairs and foliage; they had names like La Lanterna or La Fiesta; they dispensed, from huge silver machines, a frothy fluid barely recognizable as the stuff which the British were accustomed to boiling with milk in saucepans. They were the haunt of Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls, and of jukeboxes. Their jukeboxes united the Teddy-Boy contagion with that of rock ’n’ roll.
Rock ’n’ roll, as every sensible Briton knew, was American madness such as one saw as a novelty item at the end of the weekly cinema newsreel. Sometimes it was flagpole sitting, sometimes dance marathons, sometimes pie-eating contests. Now it was a young singer who did not sing but merely writhed about, pretending to play a guitar, and yet who aroused American female audiences to transports of ecstasy greater even than had Valentino, the screen lover, or Frank Sinatra, the crooner. His songs, or lack of them, and his suggestive movements, had scandalized America. When he appeared on American television he was shown only from the waist up. His name was Elvis Presley. That, too, the British thought, could only happen in America.
Yet the madness seemed to be drifting this way. In 1955, a song called “Rock Around the Clock” had caused riots in several British cinemas during shows of a film called The Blackboard Jungle—significantly, a study of juvenile crime. The singer, Bill Haley, and his group, the Comets, had afterward visited Britain, arriving in London by boat train amid mob scenes unequaled since VE night or the coronation.
That had seemed to be a freak occurrence. The country settled back again to its former dull diet of Anglicized American dance-band music—of “light orchestras,” crooners named Dennis Lotis and Dickie Valentine, and novelty songs about Italy or little Dutch dolls. Here, at least, there was a powerful guardian of morality and taste. The British Broadcasting Corporation, with its monopoly of all radio, continued to ensure that nothing was played save that in its own image and of its own cold custard consistency.
In February 1956, an Elvis Presley record called “Heartbreak Hotel” was released in Britain, on the hitherto respectable HMV label. Within days, it had smashed through the crooners and light orchestras and little Dutch dolls to first place in the Top Twenty records chart. It remained there for eighteen weeks. Another by the same singer followed it, bearing the ludicrous title “Blue Suede Shoes”; then another, even surpassing that in ludicrousness, called “Hound Dog.”
Britain’s parents listened, so far as they were able, to the lyric, so far as it could be understood. The vocalist was exhorting some bystander, endlessly and incoherently, not to tread on his blue suède shoes. He was accusing the same bystander, with equal, mumbling persistence, of being a “hound dog.” A few people over twenty enjoyed the music, and even recognized it for what it was: an adaptation of American blues, sharing the same honorable origins as jazz. Presley was simply applying blues intonation and phrasing to songs in the white cowboy, or country and western, idiom. He was, in other words, a white man who sang like a black man. The charges of obscenity were ironic. All Presley’s blues songs had been purged of their sexual and social content for the white audience’s sensitive ears.
To Britain, as to America, the idea that a white man could sing like a black man was intrinsically lewd. It confirmed the malignant power of rock ’n’ roll music to incite young people, as jungle drums incited primitive peoples, to their newly evidenced violence, promiscuity, disobedience, and disrespect. To Britain, as to America, there was only one consolation. A thing so grotesque as Elvis Presley could not possibly last. They said of rock ’n’ roll what was said in 1914, when the Great War started: In six months, it would all be over.
The headmaster of Quarry Bank High School, Liverpool, considered John Lennon and Peter Shotton to be the worst Teddy Boys among the pupils in his charge. Detentions, canings, even temporary expulsion seemed to have no effect on the insolent-faced, bespectacled boy and his fuzzy-haired companion, whose clothes conformed less and less to school regulation, and who now overtly gloried in their power to cause disturbance. A typical Lennon–Shotton incident occurred when the whole school went into Liverpool to see the film Henry V at the Philharmonic Hall. By ill luck, this had been preceded by a Donald Duck cartoon. One did not have to guess from whom, in the tittering auditorium, had come those cries of, “There he is! There’s old King Henry!”
For John, as for most fifteen-year-olds, rock ’n’ roll began as a curiosity manifest among slightly older boys. Pete Shotton and he, on their truant-playing days, would often hang around Liverpool gaping at the full-dress Teddy Boys—mostly seamen on leave from the big ships—whose disregard for authority was on a scale far more gorgeous than theirs. When Rock Around the Clock, the first Bill Haley film, reached Liverpool, John went to see it, but to his disappointment, no riot happened. There was just this fat man in a tartan jacket with a kiss curl on his forehead, and saxophones and double basses just like any dance band.
Then, at the beginning of 1956, a friend played “Heartbreak Hotel” for him. “From then on,” his Aunt Mimi said, “I never got a minute’s peace. It was Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley. In the end I said, ‘Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner, and tea.’”
Mimi had been struggling for months to keep her charge from turning into a Teddy Boy. She still sent John to school in blazers that were tailor-made, and saw no reason why these should not do for all social occasions. “Drainpipe” trousers and drape jackets were, as Mimi constantly affirmed, no kind of dress for a boy who went to Quarry Bank. The trouble was that John now spent more and more time out of Mimi’s sight with her sister, Julia, his real mother. Julia, as Mimi knew, was too easygoing to worry what John wore. Julia bought him colored shirts and gave him money to have school trousers “taken in.” He would leave Menlove Avenue a nice Quarry Bank schoolboy and then, at Julia’s, turn into a Teddy Boy as bad as any to be seen around the docks.
The stunning music that went with the clothes was available only with equal deviousness. John listened to it, as thousands did, under the bedclothes, late at night. Since the BBC would not broadcast rock ’n’ roll, the only source was Radio Luxembourg, a commercial station, beamed from the Continent with an English service after 8:00 P.M. The Elvis records came through, fading and blurred with static, like coded messages to an occupied country. Now there were other names and other songs that split open the consc
iousness with disbelieving joy. There was Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”; Bill Haley’s “Razzle Dazzle”; Freddy Bell and the Bellboys’ “Giddy-up-a-Ding-Dong.” The sound came from beyond comprehension; it played, then died out again. You could not catch it, nor sing it nor write it down.
Then, late one night over the hidden radios, a new message came. A banjo player with the Chris Barber Jazz Band had formed his own small group to record “Rock Island Line,” an American folk song dating back to the Depression, or earlier. The number was played in what jazz audiences knew already as skiffle, a style originating in the poor Southern states where people would hold rent parties to stave off the landlord, playing music on kazoos, tin cans, and other impromptu instruments. The banjoist, Tony—or “Lonnie”—Donegan, sang in a piercing pseudoblues wail, set about by elementary rhythm of which the main component was an ordinary kitchen washboard, scraped and tapped by thimble-capped fingers.
“Rock Island Line” began a national craze. For anyone could form a skiffle group simply by stealing his mother’s washboard and fixing a broom handle to a tea chest, then stringing it with wire to make a rudimentary double bass. The biggest craze of all, thanks to Elvis Presley, was for guitars. A straitlaced instrument long muffled in orchestral rhythm sections found itself suddenly the focus of all adolescent desire.
As boys pestered throughout Britain, so did John Lennon pester his aunt Mimi to buy him a guitar. Each afternoon, when Julia paid her daily visit to Menlove Avenue, she, too, would be entreated to give—even lend—him the money. For Julia, as it happened, could play the banjo a little. John’s father, Freddy, had taught her before disappearing overseas. And Freddy’s father, so he had always said, used to play professionally in America with a group of Kentucky minstrels.
It was, however, not Julia but Mimi who eventually gave in. One Saturday morning, she put on her coat, checked the money in her purse, and told John unceremoniously to come along.
Hessy’s, the music shop in Whitechapel, central Liverpool, had an abundant stock of guitars. Frank Hessy, the owner, was sending a van regularly down to London to buy up every one to be found in the Soho street markets. Jim Gretty, his showroom manager, was selling roughly one guitar a minute from the hundreds festooned along the narrow shop wall. Jim was himself a guitarist, western-style, and each week held a beginners’ class in an upstairs room, chalking huge elementary chord-shapes on the wall.
It was Jim who sold Aunt Mimi the guitar that John said he wanted—a little Spanish model with steel strings and a label inside: “Guaranteed not to split.” “It cost me seventeen pounds, I think,” Mimi said. “I know I resented paying that, even though I’d been giving twelve pounds each for his school blazers.”
From that moment, John was—as they say in Liverpool—“lost.” Nigel Walley, calling round at Mendips, would find him up in his bedroom, oblivious to time or the first soreness of fingertip split by the steel strings. “He’d sit on his bed, just strumming,” Nigel says. “Strumming the banjo chords Julia had shown him, and singing any words that came into his head. After about ten minutes, he’d have got a tune going.”
When Mimi could no longer stand the noise, or the foot beating time through her ceiling, she would order John out of the house, into the little front porch with its walls of Art Nouveau–patterned glass. “He stood there leaning against the wall so long, I think he wore some of the brickwork away with his behind,” Mimi said. “To me, it was just so much waste of time. I used to tell him so. ‘The guitar’s all very well, John,’ I told him, ‘but you’ll never make a living out of it.’”
The first skiffle group he formed had only two members: himself on guitar and his crony Pete Shotton on kitchen washboard, crashing its glass ridges with thimble-capped fingers as the two of them tried out “Cumberland Gap,” “Rock Island Line,” “Don’t You Rock Me,” “Daddy-O,” and other skiffle classics. They named themselves, in roughhewn skiffle style, the Quarry Men, after the sandstone quarries dotted around Woolton, and also in unwilling recognition of the school they both attended. The school song contains a reference to “Quarry men old before our birth”—a sentiment chorused lustily by John and Pete, since it invariably figured in the final assembly of term.
The Quarry Men grew in the image of the gang that had formerly terrorized St. Peter’s Sunday school. Nigel Walley, now a Bluecoat Grammar School boy, and Ivan Vaughan, from the Liverpool Institute, divided the role of tea-chest bass player amicably between them. Nigel’s first Teddy-Boy clothes had been seized by his policeman father and thrown on the fire, so now he kept all his choicer garments down the road at Ivan’s house. Each played bass with the Quarry Men when the other could not be bothered.
Quarry Bank High School supplied a further recruit in Rod Davis, the earnest, bespectacled boy in 4A whose parents had just bought him a banjo. Another Woolton boy named Eric Griffiths came in on the strength of his new guitar, and because he claimed to know someone on King’s Drive who owned a full-size set of drums. He took the others to meet Colin Hanton, an apprentice upholsterer who had just begun installment plan payments on a thirty-eight-pound set from Hessy’s. Colin was two years older than the others but, as he was extremely small, it didn’t matter. He was so small, he carried his birth certificate in his pocket to prove to suspicious pub landlords that he was old enough to be served with beer.
In the group, as in the gang, John was the undisputed leader. His plaid shirt collar turned up, Teddy Boy style, scowling like Elvis, he monopolized the foreground and the microphone, if there chanced to be one. “He always used to beat hell out of his guitar,” Rod Davis says. “He’d always be busting a string. Then he’d hand his guitar to me, take my banjo, and carry on on that while I knelt down in the background and tried to fix the string.
“We did all the skiffle numbers that Lonnie Donegan recorded. Right from the start, John wanted to play rock ’n’ roll as well; I can remember him singing “Blue Suede Shoes.” I’d got some Burl Ives records, so we did “Worried Man Blues.” The only way you could learn the words was by listening to the radio—or buying the record. Records were six bob (30p) each, and none of us could afford that. So John always used to make up his own words to the songs that were popular. “Long, black train” was one of them. Another one went “Come, go with me, down to the Penitentiar-ee.” They weren’t any worse than the words you were supposed to sing.”
Skiffle contests were happening all over Liverpool, at ballrooms like the Rialto and the Locarno as a cheap way of filling the intervals. In ten minutes between regular band spots three or four groups would hurry onstage and patter out their brief, invariable repertoire. The Quarry Men entered numerous such competitions, without notable success. One of the groups that continually beat them had as its chief attraction a midget named Nicky Cuff, who actually stood on the tea-chest bass while plucking at it.
Rod Davis’s father had a big old Austin Hereford car in which he would occasionally chauffeur them to a skiffle contest. For most of the time, they traveled on buses, with tea chest, drum set, and all.
On Saturday afternoons they met to practice at Colin Hanton’s house since his father, a Co-op shop manager, was guaranteed to be absent. Least practicing of all was done at Mimi’s, for the boys were somewhat in awe of her sharp tongue. Instead, they would go to Julia’s house, where they were always certain of a welcome and a laugh. Sometimes Julia would take Rod’s banjo and demonstrate chords and little runs for John and Eric Griffiths to copy on their guitars. Both as a result learned to play in banjo style, leaving the two bass strings untuned. “We used to practice standing in the bath at Julia’s,” Rod Davis says. “You could get more of an echo that way.”
In 1956, a new headmaster, William Edward Pobjoy, took charge of Quarry Bank High School. At thirty-five, he was young for such a post, and seemed younger with his boyish quiff of hair and quiet, sardonic manner. Since the new head resorted neither to shouting nor sarcasm, the Quarry Bank heavies believed they were in for an easy time.
Among the information passed on by his predecessor to Mr. Pobjoy was that John Lennon and Pete Shotton were the school’s leading criminals. “I was told there was even one master whom they not only used to terrorize, but whom Lennon had actually thumped. The poor man was so ashamed, he begged for the matter not to be reported.”
Mr. Pobjoy, in his unobtrusive way, seems to have got the measure of Lennon and Shotton. The punishment book shows that John was caned by him only once. On another occasion, he and Pete were each suspended for a week.
Mr. Pobjoy, they discovered with some astonishment, did not disapprove of skiffle. Nor did he try, on the strength of their other crimes, to stamp out the Quarry Men. He encouraged them to do anything more positive than smoking and slacking. Now when John entered the headmaster’s office—the timber merchant’s circular book room, with finely inlaid shelves, where he had been caned so many times—it would not be defiantly, as before, but to ask Mr. Pobjoy, in all humility, if the Quarry Men could play for ten minutes during the interval at the sixth form dance.
Another source of engagements was St. Peter’s parish church, Woolton. John had sung in its choir and disrupted its Sunday school, and he and Pete Shotton still belonged to its youth club, which met in the hall across the road for badminton and ping-pong. The Quarry Men would play at the youth club “hops,” unpaid and glad of an opportunity to use a stage, and experience acoustics larger than those of John’s mother’s bathroom. When John broke a guitar string he was reimbursed from church funds.
The group existed on the most casual basis, expanding and shrinking according to members available. Already there was some dissent between Rod Davis, who wished to play pure folk music, and John with his passion for Elvis. Pete Shotton was in it only for laughs, as he strove to make clear on all occasions. Little Colin Hanton, drumming irregularly, with his birth certificate in his top pocket, was more interested in pubs and pints of Black Velvet. Fights sometimes broke out between the musicians as they were performing, or with members of the audience whose criticisms were untactfully voiced. Fights broke out also if a spectator believed a Quarry Man to be ogling his girlfriend, and clambered up among them to take revenge. John Lennon, for some reason, was always the principal target of such attacks, and was seldom averse to using his fists. “Except if it was a really big bloke,” Nigel Walley says. “Then John’d be as meek as a mouse. He’d always manage to talk his way out.”
Shout! Page 6