Pete’s own skiffle career ended soon afterward at a party when John took away his washboard and smashed it over his head. “All of us were pissed and larking around. It didn’t hurt me. I just sat there, framed by the washboard, with tears of laughter running down my face. I’d known for a long time that I was no good at music—I was only in the group through being a mate of John’s. I was finished with playing, but I didn’t want to say so, nor did John. This way let me out and it let John out.”
If Pete had not left the Quarry Men at that point it is doubtful whether Paul and John would have become the close friends they subsequently did. For no two temperaments could have been more unalike. John, dour and blisteringly direct, fought against authority and inhibition in any form. Paul, baby-faced and virtuous, hated to be on anybody’s wrong side. Not least of the differences in them was their attitude to the money they earned by playing. Whereas John would—and frequently did—give away his last sixpence, Paul showed noticeable signs of thrift. One of his first suggestions on joining the Quarry Men was that Nigel Walley should not receive equal shares since, as manager, he did not actually play onstage.
What Paul and John had in common was their passion for guitars. They began to spend hours in each other’s company, practicing, usually at Paul’s. John would even let himself be seen in his hated spectacles, the better to understand the chords that Paul showed him. Whole afternoons would pass in the living room at Forthlin Road, where Jim McCartney had papered the walls with a design of Chinese pagodas. Paul’s younger brother Mike would often be there, too, taking photographs of them as they played. One of Mike’s pictures records the moment when both were able to play a full six-string chord with the left-hand index finger barring the keyboard. Their faces, as they hold up their two guitars, are rigid with pride and pain.
The other Quarry Men did not take quite so strongly to Paul. “I always thought he was a bit big-headed,” Nigel Walley says. “As soon as we let him into the group, he started complaining about the money I was getting them, and saying I should take less as I didn’t do any playing. He was always smiling at you, but he could be catty as well. He used to pick on our drummer, Colin—not to his face, making catty remarks about him behind his back. Paul wanted something from the drums that Colin didn’t have it in him to play.”
“Paul was always telling me what to do,” Colin Hanton says. ‘Can’t you play it this way?’ he’d say, and even try to show me on my own drums. He’d make some remark to me. I’d sulk. John would say, ‘Ah, let him alone, he’s all right.’ But I knew they only wanted me because I’d got a set of drums.”
Even Pete Shotton—still a close friend and ally—noticed a change in John after Paul’s arrival. “There was one time when they played a really dirty trick on me. I knew John would never have been capable of it on his own. It was so bad that he came to me later and apologized. I’d never known him to do that before for anyone.”
It was shortly after Paul joined the Quarry Men that they bought proper stage outfits of black trousers, black bootlace ties, and white cowboy shirts with fringes along the sleeves. John and Paul, in addition, wore white jackets; the other three played in their shirtsleeves. Eric Griffiths, though also a guitarist, did not have the jacket-wearing privilege. A cheerful boy, he did not recognize this for the augury it was.
Their main engagements were still at church halls like St. Peter’s in Woolton or St. Barnabas’s, off Penny Lane. A step up came when a local promoter named Charlie McBain booked them to play at regular dances at the Broadway Conservative Club and at the Wilson Hall in Garston. The latter was in a district renowned for its toughness and the size of its Teddy Boys, among whom the fashion had lately arisen of going to skiffle dances with leather belts wrapped round their hands. At Wilson Hall one night a gigantic Ted terrified the Quarry Men by clambering onto the stage in the middle of a number. But it was only to request Paul quite politely to do his Little Richard impersonation.
Nigel Walley had left school and become an apprentice golf professional at the Lee Park course. He continued to act as the Quarry Men’s manager and, despite Paul’s protests, to draw equal shares: His wallet packed with their visiting cards, he would cycle assiduously with news of a booking from one member’s house to the next. Through Nigel, they were even once invited to play at Lee Park golf club. “They did it for nothing, but they got a slap-up meal, and the hat was passed round for them afterward. They ended up making about twice what they would have done if they’d been getting a fee.”
At the golf course, Nigel got to know a doctor named Sytner whose son, Alan, had recently opened a jazz club in the center of Liverpool. Nigel arranged for the Quarry Men to appear there, too, late in 1957. The club was in Mathew Street, under a row of old warehouses, and fully deserved its name, the Cavern. It was strictly for jazz; it allowed skiffle but absolutely barred rock ’n’ roll. “We started doing Elvis numbers when we played there,” Colin Hanton says. “While we were on stage, someone handed us a note. John thought it was a request. But it was from the management, saying: ‘Cut out the bloody rock.’”
THREE
“IF I’D JUST SAID A FEW MORE WORDS, IT MIGHT HAVE SAVED HER”
John was to leave Quarry Bank school at the end of July 1957. He had taken his GCE ordinary-level examination and had failed every subject by one grade—a clear enough sign to Mr. Pobjoy, the headmaster, that with a little exertion he could have passed every one. Art, his outstanding subject, had been squandered with the rest. The question paper asked for a painting to illustrate the theme “travel.” John, for the amusement of his exam-room neighbors, drew a wart-infested hunchback.
He sat out that last summer term, stubbornly resistant to all ideas of soon having to make his way in the world. The panoramic school photograph shows him, slumped behind his Slim Jim tie, conspicuous among a fifth form (junior class) with faces otherwise expectant and purposeful. Rod Davis, the Quarry Men’s banjo player, was to enter the sixth (senior year) to do advanced-level Spanish, Latin, and history. Even Pete Shotton, John’s old partner in crime, had, to his teachers’ and possibly to his own great surprise, been accepted as a cadet at the police college on Mather Avenue.
Aunt Mimi’s great fear was that, like his father Freddy thirty years before, John would just drift away to sea. “I remember him bringing home this boy with hair in a Tony Curtis, they called it, all smoothed back with grease at the sides. ‘Mimi,’ John whispered to me in the kitchen, ‘this boy’s got pots of money. He goes away to sea.’ I said, ‘Well, he’s no captain and he’s no engineer—what is he?’ ‘He waits at table,’ John said. ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘A fine ambition!’”
Mimi afterward stumbled on a plot between John and Nigel Walley to run away to sea as ship’s stewards. Nigel says they had got as far as buying their rail tickets to the catering college. “I was rung up by this place at the Pier Head,” Mimi said, “… some sort of seaman’s employment office. ‘We’ve got a young boy named John Lennon here,’ they said. ‘He’s asking to sign up.’ ‘Don’t you even dream of it,’ I told them.”
Mimi was called to Quarry Bank to discuss with Mr. Pobjoy what John might do with his life. Reviewing his meager school achievements, there seemed only one possibility—his talent for painting, design, and caricature. “Mr. Pobjoy said to me, ‘Mrs. Smith, this boy’s an artist, he’s a bohemian. If I can get him into the art college are you prepared to keep him on for the next twelve months?’” Mimi said that she was.
Quarry Bank’s valediction was, in the circumstances, quite kind. “He has been a trouble spot for many years in discipline, but has somewhat mended his ways. Requires the sanction of ‘losing a job’ to keep him on the rails. But I believe he is not beyond redemption and he could really turn out a fairly responsible adult who might go far.”
Aunt Mimi went with him for his interview at the art college on Hope Street. “Otherwise,” Mimi said, “he’d never have been able to find it. He’d only ever been into Liverpool on the one sort of bus, t
o the shop opposite the bus stop where he used to buy his Dinky cars.”
On that day, John managed to make himself a relatively unalarming figure, submitting to both white shirt and tie and an old tweed suit that had once belonged to his uncle George. When he presented himself for enrollment, however, it was in his Teddy-Boy jacket and lilac shirt and the drainpipe jeans Aunt Mimi had forbidden him to wear. He put them on under normal trousers that he stripped off as soon as he was out of Mimi’s sight.
Hope Street bisects the old, elegant, upland part of Liverpool where cast-iron letters on street corners enshrine the great shipping dynasties of Canning, Rodney, Roscoe, and Huskisson. In 1957, the whole district round the art college was a haunt of painters, sculptors, poets, and writers, sharing the faded Georgiana in amity with small businesses, guest houses, junk shops, and West Indian drinking clubs. The Anglican cathedral being still unfinished, the principal aesthetic attraction was the Philharmonic Dining-Rooms, a pub fashioned by Cunard shipwrights in crystal and mahogany, where even the Gents’ urinals were carved of rose-colored marble.
Whatever hopes John may have had of a wild bohemian existence were confounded in his first week at college. He had been accepted for the intermediate course of two years’ general study, followed by specialization in the third and fourth years. To his disgust, he found himself in a classroom again, obliged to study a set curriculum including figure drawing, lettering, and architecture. It was, in other words, little different from the school he had just left.
His Teddy-Boy clothes estranged him instantly from his fellow students in their duffel coats, suede shoes, and chunky Shetland sweaters with sleeves pushed up to the elbow. At art college in 1957 no one liked Elvis or rock ’n’ roll: What everyone liked was traditional jazz, played in cellars flickering with beer-bottle candlelight. Indeed, the most famous Liverpool group of the moment was the Merseysippi Jazz Band, frequently to be heard on radio as well as at the Cavern Club on Mathew Street. John hated the jazz crowd, with their sweaters and their GCE passes.
His tutor on the intermediate course was Arthur Ballard, a balding, soft-spoken man who had once been a middleweight boxing champion. Himself an abstract painter of some reputation, Ballard had no great love for formal teaching and, in fact, held most of his seminars in a tiny pub called Ye Cracke, on Rice Street, where the back room was dominated by gigantic etchings of Wellington greeting Marshal Blücher and Nelson’s death at Trafalgar.
Ballard noticed John Lennon first merely as an ill-at-ease Teddy Boy whose clothes were officially disapproved of and whose posture was less defiant than dejected. “The students would pin their work up, and we’d all discuss it. John’s effort was always hopeless—or he’d put up nothing at all. He always struck me as the poor relation in the group. The rest used to cover up for him.
“Then one day in the lecture room I found this notebook full of caricatures—of myself, the other tutors, the students—all done with descriptions and verse, and it was the wittiest thing I’d ever seen in my life. There was no name on it. It took me quite a long time to find out that Lennon had done it.
“The next time student work was being put up and discussed, I brought out this notebook and held it up, and we discussed the work in it. John had never expected anyone to look at it, let alone find it funny and brilliant. Afterward I told him, ‘When I talk about interpretation, boy, this is the kind of thing I mean as well. This is the kind of thing I want you to be doing.’”
Around the windy corner, in Mount Street, Paul McCartney still daily climbed the steps to the Institute High School. That summer he had taken two O-levels, passing in Spanish but failing Latin; in 1958, he was due to take six further subjects and then go into the sixth form. The ultimate plan, ardently supported by his father, was that Paul should go on to teacher training college. His English master, “Dusty” Durband, thought this a feasible course. He could imagine Paul one day appearing in the Institute’s own staff room, or driving a modest saloon car to and from some small college of adult education.
But Paul’s school career, previously so unexceptionable, now grew unsettled and erratic. The presence of John Lennon, literally beyond the classroom wall, affected both his work and his hitherto blameless conduct. More than ever, Mr. Durband noticed, he relied on charm and facility to compensate for skimped or unfinished preparation. He had even, unknown to Mr. Durband, begun to cut certain classes. There was an internal way from the Institute into the art college, across a small courtyard beside the school kitchens. John would have told him which lecture room was empty and available for guitar practice. No one in the college thoroughfares looked twice at the big-eyed youth with his black raincoat buttoned up to the neck to hide his institute tie.
The Quarry Men had been hard hit by the flux of the final school year. Rod Davis was too busy in the Quarry Bank sixth to have any time for banjo playing. Nigel Walley had contracted tuberculosis—the consequence, he thinks, of overwork in the cause of skiffle and his golf pro job. Soon afterward, Len Garry, the bass player, fell ill with meningitis and joined Nigel at the sanatorium at Fazakerley. “The other lads used to come and see us on a Sunday. They’d bring their guitars with them, and we’d have a singsong at the end of the ward.”
The skiffle era was by now definitely over. Last year’s big names, the Vipers, Chas McDevitt, Bob Cort, even Lonnie Donegan himself, had all dropped the word “skiffle” discreetly from their billing. In Liverpool, as all over Britain, broom handles were being restored to their brushes, thimbles returned to maternal work baskets, and tea chests, decorated with musical notes, left outside for reluctant refuse men. But if thousands of skiffle groups broke up, there were hundreds more with a taste—even a talent—for performing who decided to try their luck with rock ’n’ roll.
They had the consolation of knowing that, however bad they might sound at the beginning, they did not sound much worse than professional English rock ’n’ rollers. Tommy Steele, launched in 1956 as Britain’s “answer” to Elvis Presley, had set the pattern of clumsy mimicry. Since then, there had arisen numerous other “answers” to Presley as well as to the Everly Brothers, Bill Haley, the Platters, and Little Richard. There had been Marty Wilde, the Most Brothers, Russ Hamilton, Tony Crombie, and the Rockets. Some found hit records and a large following that, for all that, regarded them much as an earlier generation had regarded British films. They were poor substitutes for the real elixir, pumped from its only true source: America.
Liverpool stood closer to America than any other place in Britain. There was still, in 1957, a transatlantic passenger route, plied by ships returning weekly to tie up behind Dock Road’s grim castle walls. With them came young Liverpudlian deckhands and stewards whom the neighbors called “Cunard Yanks” because of their flashy New York clothes. As well as Times Square trinkets for their girlfriends and panoramic lampshades of the Manhattan skyline for their mothers’ front rooms, the Cunard Yanks brought home records not available in Britain. Rhythm and blues, the genesis of rock ’n’ roll, sung by still obscure names such as Chuck Berry and Ike Turner, pounded through the back streets of row houses each Saturday night as the newly returned mariners got ready to hit the town.
The Quarry Men knew no friendly Cunard Yank who would bring them American records to copy. They had no money, either, for the new electric guitars and amplifiers now thronging Hessy’s shop window. They could not even change their name, as all the other groups were doing. The Alan Caldwell Skiffle Group had become Rory Storm and the Raving Texans. The Gerry Marsden Skiffle Group now called themselves Gerry and the Pacemakers. The Quarry Men stayed the Quarry Men because that was the name lettered on Colin Hanton’s drums.
In late 1957, American rock ’n’ roll gave struggling ex-skiffle groups in Britain their first friend. His name was Buddy Holly, although at the beginning he figured anonymously in a group called the Crickets. Among the new performers thrown up after Presley, Buddy Holly was unique in composing many of the songs he recorded, and also in showing abili
ty on the guitar, rather than using it merely as a prop. He gave hope to British boys because he was not pretty, but thin and bespectacled, and because his songs, though varied and inventive, were written in elementary guitar chords, recognizable to every beginner.
Paul McCartney had always used his guitar to help him make up tunes. His main objective in the Quarry Men, however, was to oust Eric Griffiths from the role of lead guitarist. One night at the Broadway Conservative Club he prevailed on the others to let him take the solo in a number. He fluffed it and, later, in an attempt to redeem himself, played over to John a song he had written, called “I Lost My Little Girl.” John, though he had always tinkered with lyrics, had never thought of writing entire songs before. Egged on by Paul—and by Buddy Holly—he felt there could be no harm in trying. Soon he and Paul were each writing songs furiously, as if it were a race.
Sometimes, when the Quarry Men played at Wilson Hall, they would be watched by a boy whose elaborate Teddy-Boy hair stood up around a pale, hollow-cheeked, unsmiling face. The others knew him vaguely as a schoolfriend of Paul’s and a would-be guitarist, though he played with no group regularly. His name, so Paul said, was George Harrison, and, in Paul’s opinion, he would be extremely useful as a recruit to the Quarry Men. No one, to begin with, took very much notice. For Paul’s friend was so silent and solemn and, at fourteen, so ridiculously young.
Paul had gotten to know him years before, when the McCartneys still lived at Speke and George used to catch the same bus to school each morning from the stop near Upton Green. Among the shouting, satchel-swinging crowd George Harrison was known as the boy whose dad actually drove one of these pale green Corporation buses. When Paul, one morning, was short of his full fare, George’s mother gave him extra pennies, enough to travel all the way into Liverpool.
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