by Tim Riley
After George’s death, Lennon, alone in Mimi’s household with only his beloved dog, Sally, to comfort him, tumbled into an emotional freefall. Rock ’n’ roll came along right as grief ambushed his life again, echoing all the way down to those fearsome, ten-year-old Blackpool separation anxieties.
Lennon began to follow the music’s progress in the papers throughout 1956. He begged Judy for a guitar, which she bought him: a secondhand Egmond, which cost her five pounds. Judy tuned the guitar’s top four strings as if it were a banjo (ignoring the low E and A strings), and Lennon taught himself to play from his mother’s banjo chords, trying at first to imitate Donegan’s sound.
Several forces began gathering in Lennon’s world to form the perfect Elvis storm; Presley’s rhythms were swift, but his UK ascent happened gradually. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” got slapped on as an afterthought to the sound track of Blackboard Jungle in 1955; Haley didn’t appear in the movie, but the song became huge. Lennon rushed to see it with Len Garry and Pete Shotton at the Woolton cinema, only to be disappointed. He had read all about teenage riots, but he took in a lousy teen-exploitation movie, saddled with a sound track by an overweight, middle-aged white guy with a phony curl on his forehead fronting yesterday’s big band, trying too hard to swing. “Just to be cheeky, Lennon and Shotton suddenly threw a fight out of boredom, right in the middle of the film. They turned on the lights and there was a big scene—but it was all just a laugh. I don’t even remember the film, just Lennon causing a scene,” said Garry.18
Even so, a lot of tedium still clogged the British charts. Throughout 1955, pop still propped up Frankie Laine, the cloying singer who recorded with the Paul Weston or Mitch Miller Orchestra and the Norman Luboff Choir on throwback material like “In the Beginning,” “Cool Water,” and “Strange Lady in Town” (all from 1955). Like many rock fans, Lennon recoiled when Pat Boone smoothed over Fats Domino’s original “Ain’t That a Shame,” which he knew from Radio Luxembourg. To Lennon, the racial contrast on those two records mattered less than aesthetics: Domino outsang Boone by a factor of at least ten. Hearing hard-core rock ’n’ rollers push their way up the charts through layers of treacle boasted dramatic intrigue with a visceral kick; shouting down pop was half of rock ’n’ roll’s mission. In the United States, “Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White),” as recorded by Perez Prado, spent ten weeks at the fore while Presley began to see regional chart action in the South with “That’s All Right,” buttressed by appearances on the popular Louisiana Hayride on radio and television.
Presley didn’t break wide in England until “Heartbreak Hotel,” in the spring of 1956. In cultural terms, Britain trailed behind America, but the lag worked in Presley’s favor: that summer, “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” and “Hound Dog” crowded the UK charts. Carl Perkins, Fats Domino, and Little Richard also scored hits in the UK later in 1956, while Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry began to win fans there in early 1957.
In fact, Lennon remembered reading about Elvis Presley before actually hearing his voice. Julia Baird claims that her mother first played Elvis for John;19 while his memory held on to his classmate Don Beatty’s sharing an article about Presley in the New Musical Express. The hype made Lennon suspicious.
The music papers were saying that Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra. “Heartbreak Hotel” seemed a corny title and his name seemed strange in those days. But then, when I heard it, it was the end for me. I first heard it on Radio Luxembourg. He turned out to be fantastic. I remember rushing home with the record and saying, “He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray and Tennessee Ernie Ford!”20
Lennon identified three distinct Elvis influences to make key musical connections. In Presley’s vocal style, he recognized aspects of Laine’s vaguely country “Hawk-Eye” (1955) and “Sixteen Tons” (1956), Ray’s smooth R&B hustle in “Hey There” and “Such a Night” (both from 1954), and Ford’s stately pop delivery in “Give Me Your Word” and “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” (both 1955). That these three styles were previously unconnected dots seemed far-fetched in the extreme; that Presley linked their diverse audiences remains his triumph.
Elvis Presley was the great linchpin of early rock ’n’ roll, the figure every Beatle bows down before. “Before Elvis there was nothing” became Lennon’s koan. “Suddenly it was like . . . the Messiah has come,” Paul McCartney said. “Oh God I loved him, you have no idea,” Ringo Starr proclaimed well into middle age.
For his breakthrough, Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” delivered a fast, peculiar thrill and left a dizzying afterglow. Every verse teased and threatened, and then he wound down slowly into melodramatic, agonizingly quiet refrains. Finally, as if overwhelmed, he turned guitarist Scotty Moore loose for a solo. The song turned Presley into an emotional pretzel—too much longing, too much desire, too much seduction clanging up against too much self-knowledge—and by seizing its challenge, he walked away King. All by itself, “Heartbreak Hotel” sucked you into a torrid affair that was too tempting to resist but too doomed to succeed; it was altogether thrilling, forbidden, and flamboyantly condemned. In telling the story, Elvis sounded like he had way too much to express, and the music coursed through his body like a religious passion inculcating a new believer. Metaphorically, the record brewed up backwoods emotional hooch that made you loopy at first gulp. Imagine the emotionally hungry John Lennon tasting this forbidden fruit.
Once this sound got in your head, the beat was colossal, but that booming Elvis voice was even bigger, and seemed to dominate worlds outside the song. The record seeped into Lennon’s life, and everybody else’s, like a virus, whether you had just played it or hadn’t heard it in a week. Once Presley grabbed hold, he spoke like an oracle, your new teen mentor, sitting on your shoulder, urging you to embrace romance, kiss that girl, and take a thousand other risks, even as his doubt and hesitation whispered uncertainty and dread. Presley’s daring was emphatic: it was almost as if this tremulous sound told you to take risks because not to take them meant certain defeat—playing meant winning. All you had to do was find him on your radio, or get his musical juices flowing in your walk and your talk, and you, too, could tap the Elvis within by strutting with a hero’s stride and living out the sound.
Most Americans were introduced to Elvis on their living-room televisions, via the Dorsey brothers’ Stage Show, The Milton Berle Show, The Steve Allen Show, and finally The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1956, as Presley systematically smashed everybody’s perceived notions about Southerners. Presley was beautiful, sure; but until he opened his mouth and the music took hold of his body, he was an overconfident rube. Surprise was all: to the broad middle class, here was a new kind of hick, transformed by sheer self-respect, redeemed by a glowering self-confidence.
Presley’s musical stature oozed poetry. As the quintessential American, the truck driver who transcended his own rags-to-riches dream-coming-true, he fleshed out a musical answer to actors like Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and Marlon Brando and quickly enfolded them into a larger notion about America, not just its music, but its very idea of itself. Presley’s confidence in adopting black music somehow transcended self-assurance to pose a bigger threat to Jim Crow customs than any Brown v. Board of Education ruling (1954). After Elvis, many other performers sounded vaguely show-biz, acts with mannerisms where his curled, charismatic lips and unruly hips elevated his singing into pure symbolism, recklessness as style that trumped entertainment.
To Lennon and his British friends, however, a lot of these American cultural associations simply evaporated. To them, Presley was more than just a poor kid from the provinces who made it big in the city; he carried a more universal charge as the charismatic misfit from “nowhere” who changed the way people heard and saw things quite literally all over the world. All during his ascent that year, Presley made everything that was limiting and oppressive about being youn
g in a throwback town seem charged with possibility, change, full of dares too enticing to defy. When Elvis let loose, physically as well as vocally, he threw off a thousand invisible conventions, from all the customary ways white men should sing and move their bodies to all the customs entertainers were supposed to observe in public. He was the classless truck driver, the talent who was too big to be contained by mere records, too popular to be mere celebrity, and too magical to be mere Southerner, hillbilly, hick, rube, teen singer, or flash in the pan. Everyday life, in all its tiresome expectations, suddenly pulsed to Elvis Presley’s hips.
If Donegan flung open the door, Presley turned on the lights and started a rumpus that lit up the whole dreary neighborhood. Yes, there was the sheer thrill of hearing an American youth set loose new metaphors of freedom on such a grand scale—racial, sexual, gender, and generational. But Lennon, and those he gathered around him at the time, also sensed a larger, overarching promise in Presley’s success: in the guilty pleasures of “Heartbreak Hotel,” the infinite joyride of “Hound Dog,” and the wry self-deprecation of “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” Presley was quickly a symbol of how this new music stretched out endlessly. If this Memphis hick could, in critic Greil Marcus’s words, “imagine himself King,” so could you—especially if the rest of the world saw you as a common Scouser from a nowhere northern dock town. “I’m an Elvis fan because it was Elvis who really got me out of Liverpool,” Lennon later said. Once he heard Elvis sing, “that was life, there was no other thing. I thought of nothing else but rock ’n’ roll.”21
Presley’s first UK sortie came in May of 1956 with “Blue Suede Shoes,” on the heels of Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle boom, like two relay runners passing a magical baton; and once he got a toehold on the British charts, he kept right on gunning until he had outlapped Donegan as well, each hit another rabbit from his hat, until Christmas brought the gooey Love Me Tender, his first film and a consolidation of his fame. “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “Hound Dog” were so popular they kept returning to the top ten every few weeks that year, volleying for primacy, and when September rolled around, a rerelease of “Heartbreak Hotel” gave Presley his first UK number one. It was Presley’s UK year, but Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ doo-wop “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” also peaked that July, and among the other records Lennon bought and devoured in 1956 were Carl Perkins’s hell-bound rockabilly “Blue Suede Shoes,” Little Richard’s powder-keg “Rip It Up,” and Fats Domino’s slow-rolling “Blueberry Hill.” All the while, Frankie Laine was serenading UK listeners with his cowboy drivel. He kept having hits, but once RCA started marketing Presley in England and Europe, Laine’s presence shriveled in the newcomer’s glare.
Every time parents, or the prim Aunt Mimi, denounced Presley, his authority swelled. Lennon’s adoration must have felt boundless. Everything about Elvis had flash and humor, every gesture an element of self-mockery (“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” alone snickered at every other sticky valentine while delivering its own affection). He could go all slurpy in “Love Me Tender” or “Love Me,” but these sentimental ballads never detracted from his toughness, the guileless humor and illicit thrills of his streak through the first six months of 1957 hits: “Mystery Train,” “Rip It Up,” “Too Much,” “All Shook Up,” “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” In a flash, pop music posed pictures of integration beyond anything American or British culture had yet seen in real life.
Lennon’s classmate Michael Hill remembers taking lunch breaks from school at his empty house (his mother worked), where he, Lennon, and two or three other friends smoked cigarettes, drank hot chocolate, and ate potato chips while listening to the latest records. Since rock received little mainstream airplay at the time, whenever one of the group acquired a new 45 it quickly became a shared secret. One sunny spring day in 1956, five of them biked over to Hill’s house for their movable listening party. Hill himself was late to the rock trend, and eager to confirm his credentials as a guy in the know by showing off his latest acquisition from Holland, where he’d just been on a school trip. He doesn’t remember what led him to buy this particular record, but he does remember its yellow label, and the old family radiogram—a record player, and radio, and speakers housed in the same wooden cabinet.
The record Hill boasted about was a 78 rpm by Little Richard that had been released on the Ronnex label, a small Belgian firm that imported American R&B to Europe. (It was also a rarity: Little Richard didn’t score a UK hit with this record until 1957.) And Hill was quite confident that he had scored big. All the other guys were dead (read: extreme) Elvis fans; “Heartbreak Hotel” had made such a searing impression that his status as King was unassailable. Hill made an outlandish boast before playing the single: he proclaimed this new singer “better than Elvis.” That riled Lennon—until the needle dropped into the grooves and Little Richard began to sing “Long Tall Sally.” “I rarely remember him losing his composure,” Hill recalls. “But that day he dropped his guard completely. . . . He was clearly stunned at what he heard. He didn’t want to be convinced that Little Richard was better than Elvis. We played it over and over again, and I must say it was one of the few times any of us ever saw Lennon completely lose his tough veneer.”22
Years later, Lennon described hearing “Long Tall Sally” for the first time as a pivotal moment in his musical development. “When I heard it, it was so great I couldn’t speak.” This was a matter of the utmost gravity to him: who could dare challenge the King? Hill’s claim was blasphemy. And yet the power of “Long Tall Sally” was irrefutable, indomitable. “How could they be happening in my life, both of them?” Lennon remembered thinking of the two singers. At last, to break the tension, one member of the group pointed out that Little Richard was “a nigger,” using the forbidden word to be cool; and somehow this solved Lennon’s dilemma. Revealing his limited exposure to the cultural universe outside his part of Liverpool, he said, “I didn’t know Negroes sang.” In his mind, the difference between a white man and a black was so fundamental that they could never compete with each other. They belonged in different categories. “Thank you, God,” he told himself, relieved that this showdown had some kind of resolution, that one needn’t displace the other. Even better: the sound proclaimed how much room there was for both rock characters—and more, too.
The labels on “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Long Tall Sally” were different colors, and swirled around Lennon’s early impressions of these two vocal characters, setting off obsessive thoughts about the music’s packaging even before he’d seen how Little Richard’s screams unraveled his bouffant.
A bright boy like John could not fail to see through his aunt Mimi’s deceptions. Mimi had concealed her sister’s close proximity until John was eleven or twelve, and as they became reacquainted, Judy treated him more like a nephew than a son. Revelations since Mimi’s death in 1991 intensify the possessive undercurrents between the two Stanley sisters. With Dykins, her new common-law husband, Judy had finally settled into motherhood and family life in her thirties, as her son would do in his own life. Judy seems to have relinquished most of the important decisions about young John’s upbringing and education to Mimi, and only welcomed him back to her new home as he entered adolescence. The anxious maternal voltage between these sisters—one with children, one without—crackled straight through John’s internal fuse box.
Once he started Quarry Bank and built his reputation as a tough, Lennon battled more and more against Mimi’s iron hand. Judy lived just two miles from Mendips, and as he came of age, her more relaxed household became a refuge from the stultifying Aunt Mimi, and her daughters adopted John as an older brother once removed. The laughter and music in Judy’s house became an oasis. With her charismatic, elusive personality, he began to identify with her as the real mother he’d longed for since she gave him up. Unlike Mimi, Judy also enjoyed watching John embrace the new Teddy-Boy trend, and she “gave me my first colored shirt,” Lennon remembered. “I starte
d going to visit her at her house. I met her new bloke and didn’t think much of him. I called him Twitchy. Julia became a sort of young aunt to me, or a big sister. As I got bigger and had more rows with Mimi, I used to go and live with Julia for a weekend.”23
Most narratives stress Lennon’s patronizing attitude toward the “new bloke,” Bobby Dykins. Yet Julia Dykins Baird claims that they were an extended family in every sense. It was Dykins’s “funny little nervous cough” that inspired John to nickname him “Twitchy,” Baird wrote, but “never to his face. He actually called him Bobby, as our mother did.”24 Dykins occasionally found John odd jobs at the Adelphi—the same hotel where Alf Lennon had been working as a bellboy when he met Judy Stanley. An only child in the Smith household, John enjoyed playing big brother to his younger half sisters. “We certainly weren’t the only family in our street with odd domestic arrangements,” Julia Baird recalled. “There was one family with nine children, two of whom lived with their grandmother. . . . The children of another family were looked after by their father because their mother only came home at weekends. . . . She worked in London.”25
Judy’s home attracted Lennon for other reasons. Mother and son both craved music and laughter. Julia Baird described her mother walking down the street with her panties fashioned around her head like a scarf. Judy clearly preferred the sisterly role to the maternal, and relished the chance to participate in John’s adolescence. As Judy’s satellite home welcomed him in, she reentered his life in the way she felt most comfortable—almost as a peer.