A Simple Twist of Fete[I]
The only real surprise about the 1957 St. Peter’s Church garden fete was that the Quarry Men were part of it.
In the more than forty years that Woolton’s villagers had celebrated an event they commonly referred to as “the Rose Queen,” only marching bands had ever entertained. There was still a heroic glow, a natural emotional response, to all those ruddy-faced men in uniform playing stilted pop standards arranged as though they were meant to accompany the retreat at Dunkirk. The crowds who lined the church field each July cheered as a featured band pumped out all the good old songs, the melodies born in some distant smoke when husbands and fathers trooped off to defend the empire’s honor. But something had changed. The steady song of the men in blue failed to enchant their children, whose expanding world held little glamour for tradition. Bessie Shotton, Pete’s mother, convinced the church fete committee that a skiffle band would bridge the divide between young and old and proposed the Quarry Men—all but one of whom, she assured them, had been confirmed at St. Peter’s—as the obvious choice.
The boys were understandably ecstatic. The garden fete (Scousers pronounced it fate) was “the biggest social event on the village calendar,” a church fund-raiser that coincided with the feast of St. Peter, for which the entire community turned out. In addition to performing, the Quarry Men were offered another distinction: riding in the annual procession, a parade of decorative floats presenting the Rose Queen and her entourage that threaded lazily through the village streets while members of the Discoverers, as the church youth club was known, worked the pliant crowd for contributions.
The band clambered onto a flatbed truck that departed the church slightly after two o’clock on the afternoon of July 6. They were conveniently positioned at the rear end of the cavalcade, so far from the front car that they barely even heard the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry, which led the procession. With a stretch, they could see the young queen herself, a sunstruck rosebud named Sally Wright, whose pink crinoline dress had wilted like gardenia petals in the sticky heat. Behind her, Susan Dixon, fourteen, whose reign was ending, waved at the crowd with the poise of a forty-year-old. Children in elaborate costumes, along with groups of Boy Scouts, Brownies, Girl Guides, and Cubs, perched gaily atop the floats, dangling their legs over the sides like fringe.
The Quarry Men began to play as the procession turned onto King’s Drive, but it was clear from the start that even their staging was in disarray. “John packed it in straightaway,” Colin Hanton explains, “because people in the crowd were only getting [to hear] a couple strums as we [went by]. He, Eric, and Len just gave up; they fenced with each other, horsing around, which left it to Rod on the banjo and me on drums, just making a noise until we got back to the [church].”
By that time, St. Peter’s was engulfed with people: clusters of adults, teenage couples, and children spilled rhythmically across the narrow courtyard and beyond it onto the graveled path that separated the sanctuary from the dilapidated church hall. A smell of circus lingered in the heavy blanched air. Long tables had been set up on the grass, teetering with sandwiches and cakes. Lemonade stands were posted at either end, diagonally across from a plywood booth where children, their bodies nicely poised in liftoff, leaned strategically over a rope in an effort to land wooden rings on the necks of milk bottles. There were literally dozens of such stalls on the field out behind the church: dart games, coin tosses, quoits, and a treasure hunt. Used books were stacked for sale, as were lacquered candy apples, handkerchiefs and scarves, even household bric-a-brac.
Legend has it that the lads, anxious about playing in front of such a familiar crowd, decided to lubricate their nerves with a few hastily downed beers, but that simply isn’t true. “John wasn’t drinking, certainly not that day,” Colin Hanton insists. None of the other musicians recall there being any alcohol, either. Eyewitnesses say that John and Pete Shotton traveled together for a while but separated when John ran into his twelve-year-old cousin, David Birch, who had come to hear him play.
Birch reported seeing John’s mother and Aunt Mimi somewhere on the grounds, which, unbeknownst to the younger boy, set off an alarm. Earlier that morning Mimi had castigated John for “coming downstairs dressed like a Teddy boy,” in skintight jeans and a checkered shirt, and that was one scene he preferred not to have replayed in public, if it could be avoided. Instead, the boys drifted in the opposite direction to watch a Liverpool police dog obedience display, featuring Alsatians trained to jump through fire-encrusted hoops.
About four o’clock, the band was introduced by the vicar himself, “a simple soul” of weatherproof rightness named Maurice Pryce-Jones. Though accounts differ somewhat, this appears to be what happened next: The Quarry Men played a spirited set of songs—half skiffle, half rock ’n roll—that was greeted enthusiastically by the wide-eyed youngsters who had pressed around the stage. “The singing got raunchier and raunchier,” recalls someone who was standing in the crowd, “and the sound got louder and louder.” John recalled: “It was the first day I did ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ live on stage,” and one can only imagine how he cut loose on it. He also mangled a version of “Come Go with Me” to hilarious effect.
At some point Julia heard the music and dragged Mimi with her to investigate. John’s radar picked his aunt right out of the crowd, though he misread her stunned reaction for dismay. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him,” she told a writer as late as 1984. “I was pleased as punch to see him up there.” And yet in a different rendering, Mimi claimed she “was horrified to behold [John] standing in front of the microphone.” Either way, her presence threw John slightly off balance, and aside from a little wordplay that incorporated Mimi cleverly into a lyric, he toned down the remainder of the performance.
Shortly before they were finished, both Eric Griffiths and Pete Shotton noticed Ivan Vaughan standing below them, off to the right of the stage, with another boy in tow. They were both particularly happy to see Ivy—a dear, charismatic, unflagging friend and occasional member of the Quarry Men, who stood in for Len Garry when he was unavailable to rehearse. Smiles were exchanged, and somewhere in the communication it was understood that they would all hook up with one another after the show.
Afterward, in the Scout hut, Ivan came in like a cannon. He said hello to everyone, then introduced his friend from school—Paul McCartney. Everyone glanced up from around a table, where they were having coffee, and nodded perfunctorily. Colin Hanton remembers, “I was sitting off by myself, just playing drums; a couple of older Boy Scouts were playing their bugles and just messing about. But it was clear once Ivan and Paul got around to John, there was a lot of ‘checking out’ being done.”
Len Garry recalled: “There was a bit of a stony atmosphere at first…. Ivan had told John about Paul being a great guitarist, so he felt a bit threatened.” And Pete Shotton noted that John, who was “notoriously wary of strangers… acted, at first, almost standoffish.” John’s eyes slit to pin Paul fast in the taupey lamplit room. McCartney, who was younger and looked it, wore an outfit that required a little getting used to: a white sport coat with an underweave of fine silvery thread that sparkled, depending upon how the light hit it. The jacket, which was meant to convey a cheeky, debonair look, seemed almost comical on Paul, whose body was helplessly plump, his moonface putty-soft and pale. He had beautiful eyes, though, like a spaniel’s, and his spunk was jacked up several notches, almost to the point of being cocky for a boy who was, for all intents, on foreign turf.
Curiously, Paul had brought his guitar along with him. Sensing an opportunity, he stole the spotlight, running through a version of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” complete with the sibilant rockabilly phrasing and an Elvisy catch in his throat. “He played with a cool, authoritative touch,” recalls Nigel Walley. There is a tricky little downshift in the chord progression when the chorus, played in the key of G, drops in a difficult F chord, and Paul handled it effortlessly, vamping on the guitar strings with the heel of his hand. He had also succeeded in memorizing the lyrics, which was no mean feat, considering how Cochran jammed them up against one another in the galloping minute-and-three-quarters-length song. His voice almost hiccuped the chorus:
“So I walked one, two flight, three flight, four
five, six, seven flight, eight flight more,
Up on the twelfth I’m starting to sag,
fifteenth before I’m ready to drag,
Get to the top—I’m too tired to rock.”
“Right off, I could see John was checking this kid out,” says Pete Shotton, who was standing behind John, off to the side. “Paul came on as very attractive, very loose, very easy, very confident—wildly confident. He played the guitar well. I could see that John was very impressed.”
Paul must have picked up on it, too. He seemed to zero right in on John, whom he recognized as the band’s legitimate front man. Not wanting to lose the edge, he launched into his own rendition of “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” It impressed John that Paul knew all the words; John could never remember them, preferring to make up his own as the rhyme scheme required. Paul’s version of the song drove harder, was sharper, bringing the tonic fifth in on cue, which the band had simply ignored. And he sang it with all the stops pulled out, belting it with complete abandon, as if he were standing in front of his bedroom mirror, without anyone else in the room. The fact that a local band and a dozen Scouts were crowded in there didn’t seem to faze Paul. Conversely, the onlookers were riveted by his performance.
“It was uncanny. He could play and sing in a way that none of us could, including John,” Eric Griffiths recalls. “He had such confidence, he gave a performance. It was so natural. We couldn’t get enough of it. It was a real eye-opener.”
But Paul wasn’t finished yet. Knowing even then how to work an audience, he tore through a medley of Little Richard numbers—“Tutti Frutti,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and “Long Tall Sally”—really cutting loose, howling the lyrics like a madman, scaling those treacherous vocal Alps that served as the coup de grâce.
“Afterwards,” Colin Hanton says, “John and Paul circled each other like cats.” Their interest in each other was deeper and more complex than it appeared to anyone watching the encounter. There was instant recognition, a chemical connection made between two boys who sensed in the other the same heartfelt commitment to this music, the same do-or-die. For all the circling, posturing, and checking out that went on, what it all came down to was love at first sight.
After listening to Paul play, John recalled, “I half thought to myself, ‘He’s as good as me.’ Now, I thought, if I take him on, what will happen? It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join [the band]. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.”
Paul and Ivan left before the Quarry Men’s evening “dance concert” in the church hall, playing between sets of an old-fashioned dance band. Aside from a brief electrical storm, which knocked out the lights for a while, the later show came off without a hitch. The Quarry Men packed up their gear afterward and hopped onto various buses home, except for John and Pete, who decided to walk. It was a beautiful night. The storm had drained the humidity from the air, and the boys took a shortcut along a piece of land they called “the style,” a “slither of rock only as wide as a passageway” that led across the quarry into Linkstor Road.
They walked without talking most of the way. At some point during their stroll, John glanced sideways at his friend and asked, “What did you think of that kid, Paul?” Shotton was crestfallen at what he interpreted as “a danger signal,” a warning that their friendship was about to face a serious challenge. “I’d watched his reaction. In his question ‘What did you think of him?’ he was talking about personally, not musically.” Pete answered John honestly. “I liked him, actually,” he said. “I thought he was really good.”
Shotton realized then and there that Paul’s infiltration was “a fait accompli.” Even when John immediately inquired, “What do you think about him joining the band?” he knew the decision had already been made.
[II]
That summer, everything changed—the friendship, the band, and especially their lives.
At the end of July, postcards were returned containing the test scores of the General Certificate of Education Ordinary level exams that fifth formers had taken before school let out. The O levels were crucial to a student’s destiny: they determined whether a sixteen-year-old was eligible to return for a sixth year, go on to higher education, or be unloaded into the workforce. “The whole point of a grammar school was to get students to do well on this examination and hopefully go on to university,” says Rod Davis, who had passed his subjects with flying colors, thus designating him for Cambridge. It didn’t seem to faze John that he had failed every one of them, most by just a few points below the 45 percent cutoff. He was “disappointed” in not passing art, a course that by all accounts he should have aced, but as he was to admit, “I’d given up.” John refused all Mimi’s suggestions for apprenticeships and jobs in the family domain.
Instead, John turned all his attention and energy to the pursuit of music. He was haunted by Paul McCartney’s display of skill at the garden fete, the way he’d wielded the guitar so smoothly and with such panache, the way he’d sung all the correct words to the rock ’n roll songs. “Paul had made a huge impression on John,” says Pete Shotton. “In a way, his ability underscored all John’s [musical] shortcomings.”
Retreating to his bedroom, John practiced the guitar for hours each day in an effort to broaden his repertoire. Painstakingly, he transposed the banjo chords he’d learned into proper guitar positions. He waited patiently for certain songs to play over Radio Luxembourg, then copied a line or two of lyrics into a notebook, satisfied that he’d made some progress until the next opportunity arose. He cherished these transcripts as though they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, he told later interviewers.
None of this, however, satisfied his desire to streamline the band. As it was, the Quarry Men were as ragtag a bunch of musicians as anyone could put together. Of the core group, only Rod Davis showed any promise, and he was committed to playing skiffle, which John was growing to detest. The rest of the lads—Griff, Len, and Colin—had no spark, as far as he was concerned. They’d served a purpose, but they’d outlived their usefulness.
John spent much time debating what to do about the situation—and Paul. “Was it better to have a guy who was better than the guy I had in?” he wondered. “To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger?”
Ivan Vaughan solved part of the problem by simply inviting Paul McCartney to join the Quarry Men. He and Len Garry, who were classmates of Paul’s, had independently courted their friend during the last week school was in session. “John was very laid-back about it,” recalls Shotton, offering no real enthusiasm other than saying, “Oh. Great.” But Pete could tell that “he seemed relieved” by the development. The only foreseeable problem was that Paul was leaving immediately for Scout camp, followed by a spell at Butlins Holiday Camp in Yorkshire with his father and brother, and wasn’t expected back until school started in September.
In fact, in the interim John had time to polish his technique and attend to other matters that necessitated his attention. One had to do with the gridlock on guitar that would be caused by Paul’s joining the band. It was impractical for the Quarry Men to carry four guitarists, especially in light of Paul’s ability. That meant either Rod or Griff would have to be sacked. “Rod took everything too seriously,” says an observer who often accompanied the band and considered Davis “a bit snobbish, too concerned with doing things by the book.” On several occasions John had reprimanded him for appearing “too flash,” which, in Davis’s opinion, signaled that “he didn’t want it to look as though I could play better than him.” There had always been some friction between the boys, be it their attitude toward school or their regard of propriety in general. In any case, the choice was simple and relatively painless. Davis had gone on summer vacation to Annecy, France, and was eased out of the band by his very absence.
In the following years, while at Cambridge, Rod played banjo in a similar band that succeeded, however superficially, in making a record for Decca.* Rod mentioned this rather blithely to John when they bumped into each other crossing Clayton Square in Liverpool center in the spring of 1960. An actual record—the taste of it must have made John salivate with envy. “He asked me if I could [learn to] play drums and wanted to go to Hamburg,” Rod recalls with a pang of wistfulness. As preposterous as the idea sounded at the time, it nevertheless intrigued him, even if his parents strictly forbade it. He was preparing to enter his final year at university—and besides, the band, as it was described, sounded like another of John’s flaky deals. The name told Rod everything he needed to know: they were now calling themselves the Beatles.
Mimi had resigned herself to the fact that John would not, as she had hoped, return to Quarry Bank for the prestigious sixth form; John’s O level results put that squarely out of consideration. And yet, she was not convinced that his situation was hopeless. He wasn’t beyond redemption; he wasn’t like his father. One thing was certain: Mimi wouldn’t allow John to waste away in his bedroom with that guitar. Whatever the consequences of his indifference toward school, the responsibility fell to Mimi alone. She’d have to make some crucial decisions for him.
Mimi’s mission was precipitated by an event that had nearly rendered her apoplectic. The first week in August, John and Nigel Walley procured railway passes to Hampshire, where they intended to enroll at a catering college. John discussed his plan with Mimi, who put her foot down. No nephew of hers was going to be a ship’s steward, especially considering the deplorable precedent: Freddie Lennon wasn’t her idea of a role model, not of any kind. Mortified by such a scheme, she accosted John’s headmaster, William Pobjoy, and demanded that he sort something out for the boy he let slip through the cracks.
Pobjoy recommended that they reapply to Liverpool College of Art. John had gone there for an interview before receiving the O levels results but failed to impress the proper authorities. But Pobjoy’s letter appealing to Headmaster Stephenson won John a reprieve. This time Mimi picked out his wardrobe and accompanied him to the school, a fortresslike building on Hope Street, next door to the Liverpool Institute. He was interviewed by Arthur Ballard, who taught painting. Even before John met him, Ballard’s name struck an appropriate chord of awe. There were marvelous stories about Ballard’s exploits—as a former heavyweight boxer, drinker, womanizer, vulgarian, rebel, aesthete, “soft-core” communist, and all-around provocateur at a conservative institution where the emphasis was on making art as opposed to waves. His status as a legendary teacher was due in no small part to an irresistible personality, a gritty, vaunted machismo that galvanized his lectures. And he was extraordinarily talented. No one outside of the other Beatles would take more of an interest in John’s welfare until, three years later, Brian Epstein materialized.
Be that as it may, there was no immediate bond formed between John and Ballard—far from it, in fact. From that first meeting there was palpable friction between them. Ballard’s brusque demeanor intimidated John, who reacted defensively. Conversely, the cheekiness and defiance that provided for John at Quarry Bank didn’t cut it with Ballard; he didn’t for a moment buy into the boy’s indulgent attitude. “Arthur could see right through John,” says a classmate who knew Ballard socially. And yet, on a deeper level, he recognized budding potential that had escaped other educators. Whether there was an artistic empathy in the haphazard line drawings or merely some dim intuition he tapped into, Ballard felt John deserved a chance and endorsed his entrance application.
Good news aside, it was no cause for celebration. When Mimi received the art college acceptance letter, John acknowledged it grudgingly. School was for grinds. “I was [going] there instead of going to work,” he would admit. There was nothing anyone could teach him that wasn’t better served by his wits. That much he’d learned from experience.
Through the summer, John grappled with adolescent longings. He had taken notice of Barbara Baker, a pretty, valentine-faced girl with a thick, slightly wild array of mauve-colored hair, flirtatious eyes, and a way of looking at him that suggested she had his number, which she did. In fact, she had had it from when they were both nine, at which time she pegged him as “a rather nasty little boy” who fired rubber-tipped arrows at her from a treehouse perch on Menlove Avenue. Though he saw Barbara daily, often listening to records in the parlor of Mendips, John was reluctant to introduce her as his girlfriend. “With Mimi, I was always just one of the gang,” said Barbara, who sensed in John’s aunt “an air of foreboding.” It was evident from the way he acted that John preferred that Mimi not interfere in this new grown-up area of his life. Barb’s status was more aboveboard at Julia’s, where she received his mother’s enthusiastic approval and felt, if not one of the family, at least “completely comfortable” in the role of girlfriend.
It wasn’t just romance that had him dizzy. He was moving on to college and away from the old gang; breaching the bounds between Aunt Mimi’s and Julia’s house; changing his appearance to suit a restless soul; and experiencing an intense emotional awakening. In the midst of all this was the crucible of his consuming passion—music. Rock ’n roll—what precious little there was of it in Liverpool—became his dependable touchstone. The execution itself was still primitive—John had barely five chords under his belt—but its effectiveness was dead-on. It was only a matter of time before someone or something provided the proper tools.
In a manner of speaking, he could have held his breath. The last week in August, Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool, tanned and noticeably slimmer. In addition to starting school, he came back to begin a relationship he seemed destined for: hooking up with John Lennon. Their first official practice together, a Saturday afternoon get-together in Colin Hanton’s living room, was more revealing than productive. Paul blew in, full of enthusiasm, ready to rock. He knew “more than a dozen songs” that the boys had been eager but unable to pull off: “Party Doll,” “Honeycomb,” and “Bye Bye Love,” among them. John had been working on “All Shook Up,” but Paul had it down cold, with all the vocal trimmings. Such an extravagant outpouring did not go unappreciated. For perhaps the first time in his life, John ceded the spotlight without putting up a struggle. In another situation, he might have misread this spectacle as a blatant power grab; anxious about losing control, sarcasm would have surfaced to mask his envy and inexperience. But he was enamored of Paul’s prodigious talent, so much so that all previous reservations disappeared. Transfixed, John squatted on his haunches, squinting, close enough to study Paul’s elastic hands. Despite the convoluted right-handed chording (Paul was left-handed), which gave a reverse “mirror image” to his patterns, the mechanics made perfect sense to John. “Paul taught me how to play properly,” John recalled. “So I learned [the chords] upside down, and I’d go home and reverse them.” Paul, he discovered, had the necessary tools to build a sturdy musical foundation. Hanton and Eric Griffiths did their best to keep up during this and subsequent sessions, but next to Paul’s stylish craftsmanship, their best proved inadequate.* An instinctive musician only served to highlight their shortcomings. And in Paul, John saw something that he’d never before consciously considered, something essential that couldn’t be taught or absorbed. More than his ability or his singing voice, both of which were first-rate, John admired Paul’s knack for performing, his seemingly innate power to excite, to shade the music with personality. It seemed to define everything John was thinking about rock ’n roll and a way to perform.
“From the beginning, Paul was a showman,” says Pete Shotton. “He’d probably been a showman all his life.”
It was rough and it was raw, but it was also one of those moments when invisible pieces of an invisible jigsaw puzzle snap together. Never in the realm of pop music would there be a more perfect or productive match—all the more timely, because individually Paul McCartney and John Lennon were headed for trouble.
[III]
On a cool September day in 1957, between classes at the Liverpool College of Art, Bill Harry was relaxing in a corner of the canteen with two friends from the school’s new graphic design department. The three artistes, as they referred to themselves, were critiquing students at the other tables, conferring in urgent whispers, and growing more depressed—and scornful—by the minute. “To us, they were all dilettantes, dabblers,” recalls Harry, a poor boy from a tough dockside neighborhood who believed that art students by their nature ought to be practicing bohemians. These classmates disgusted him for their anemic conformity: every one of them dressed alike, in either fawn, gray, or bottle green turtleneck sweaters and corduroy pants beneath either fawn, gray, or bottle green duffel coats. A postwar squirearchy of provincial underachievers gone back on their birthright.
Suddenly his gaze rotated toward the dark streak of a figure weaving through the tables with a violent grace. “Bloody hell!” Harry shouted, startling his friends from their funk. “That’s a teddy boy there!”
All eyes noticed. John Lennon stuck out “like a sore thumb,” in a baby-blue Edwardian jacket and frilly shirt with a string tie, black pegged jeans, and the kind of crepe-soled orthopedic shoes such as Frankenstein would wear. With his hair ducktailed down behind his neck and jaw-length sideburns, the jarring “ted” image emanated heat. Bill Harry wondered how a character like that had managed to slip into a toothless enclave like the art college.
It had been easy, of course—and irresistible. Unlike the procrustean law enforced at Quarry Bank, the art college had no dress code, no nervous courtesies. There were no masters prowling the halls like bounty hunters, pouncing on offenders, no detention handed out for minor infractions. All gallant pretenses were abandoned. “There was total and utter freedom,” recalls a student who was enrolled in John’s class, “and everyone thought it was fantastic.”
But no one other than John took such sartorial liberties. There had been a clangor about him from the start, an “intimidating air” of self-parody. His appearance was “so over the top,” the effect so “exaggerated and conspicuous,” according to another classmate, that it seemed calculated to attract attention. “I imitated Teddy boys,” John recalled, “but I was always torn between being a Teddy boy and an art student. One week I’d go to art school with my art-school scarf on and my hair down, and the next week I’d go for the leather jacket and tight jeans.” Ann Mason, a student in the painting department who also happened to be in the canteen, recalls the impression John cast on the others sitting there. “He was quite a sight,” she says, adding, “shocking, but also ridiculous, because he was the only one in a teddy boy outfit. Nobody else at college was interested in that trend. As artists, we were conceited enough to think we were before the fashion, rather than following it. [T]o those of us who weren’t of his mind-set, the more in fashion someone tried to be, the more out of it they seemed. So, after the initial impact, we didn’t take much notice of anybody like John.”
Everyone ignored John’s outlandish display—everyone, that is, except Bill Harry. “Ah—he’s the unconventional one!” Harry recalls thinking at the time. “I’ve got to get to know him.”
No one could have predicted a more improbable friendship: Harry, the soft-spoken little leprechaun, perpetually amused, with a tense, troubled smile, and an air of sorrowful endurance that dated from his father’s early death and the abject poverty it imposed on his childhood, and Lennon, whose outbursts were barely contained, boisterous and cynical, with an indifference wrought from Aunt Mimi’s pampered custody. Whereas John had bumbled through a posh grammar school, Bill fought his way, literally, through the gritty St. Vincent’s Institute, where even the priests would “bang you upside the head” to make their point and where students ultimately jumped him, kicked in his appendix, and left him for dead, an incident that caused his penniless mother to transfer him to art school. Not until Bill latched onto his cousin’s science-fiction books did his artistic aptitude bear fruit. Devouring them by candlelight (there was no electricity in the house), he eventually started his own science-fiction magazine, Biped, at the age of thirteen, working until dawn illustrating it, along with Tarzan comic books and fanzines. By the time he got to art college, his ambition was in full bloom. “They gave me a room… with a desk, a typewriter, and a copy machine,” Harry remembers, “and I [started] a [school] magazine called Premier.”
More than sharing a talent for drawing, John was drawn to Harry’s offbeat brand of humor, a confection of double entendres and puns that coalesced in a guerrilla satire group, the Natty Look Society, which gained notoriety by posting whimsical illustrations on the college bulletin board. From the outset, he admired John’s immense reserve of raw talent and knew that for all his friend’s abrasiveness, cynicism, disruptive behavior, outrageousness, and general apathy toward art, there was something wildly inventive that would eventually take root. “John had a fantastic imagination that enabled him to see things for what they really were,” Harry recalls, “and then jumble them up in a hilarious, thought-provoking way. With a little luck, [I hoped] it would rub off on all of us.”
Harry immediately attached himself to John and drew him into an inner circle of students with artistic and intellectual aspirations. The most appealing among them, both for his mordant wit and precocious ability with a paintbrush, was an elfin, delicately handsome boy named Stuart Sutcliffe. A year older than John, Sutcliffe had a “marvelous art portfolio” by the age of fourteen and was already “a really talented, serious painter, one of the stars at the art college.” Unlike most of his classmates, he had no Scouse accent, having been born in Edinburgh and raised there on and off since childhood; nevertheless, he qualified for an art school scholarship by having lived near enough to Liverpool while his father, Charles, a navy officer, was at sea. Stuart, like John, had been shaped by a household of women and emotional disarray. “More often than not, our father was abroad,” recalled Sutcliffe’s sister Pauline. On those rare occasions when home, he’d take Stuart and his roommate, Rod Murray, to the pub “for a real good booze-up,” after which he’d slip Stuart ten quid. “Then they wouldn’t see each other again for six months,” Pauline said. Their mother, Millie, worked full-time as a teacher, moonlighting as the local Labour Party officer, “which meant that Stuart was always in charge. He liked being the head of the household,” Pauline remembered. And despite the encumbrance of chores, as well as a steady babysitting job for novelist Beryl Bainbridge and her husband, Austin Davis, an art school don, he still immersed himself in painting and the pursuit of romantic mysticism.
“Stuart was obsessed with Kierkegaard and mysticism,” Harry says. “And together we pored over those big mysterious questions: What does the future hold? What will happen to us? How can we extend the powers of the mind, expand our consciousness?” Like most art students, they glorified the existentialists—“not so much Sartre as Françoise Sagan”—and French cinema, spending hours camped out in the dark Continental Theatre in Birkenhead, where coffee was served between features of Bonjour Tristesse and Ashes and Diamonds.
For John, the dreamy, pensive musings of Bill Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe were rich new sources to mine; but for laughs, which he craved, he turned to another art school misfit, Geoff Mohammed. If anyone was more conspicuous than John at the college, it was Mohammed, a hulking six foot three student of Indian and French-Italian extraction who drank, ranted, and blustered his way through classes without producing a scintilla of credible work. The product of a boarding school education, followed by a stint in the military police, Mohammed developed a passion for philosophy, palmistry, and jazz, the latter of which—not art—consumed his waking hours. John made no secret of the fact that he despised jazz, but he was nonetheless enamored of Geoff’s defense of it. Some years before, upon learning that Humphrey Lyttelton had forsaken traditional jazz for its modern counterpart, Geoff had waited for the renowned musician backstage one night after a show and dutifully punched him in the nose. “Geoff was very unconventional, with a magpie mind and attitude,” says Ann Mason, “and that made him quite unique in John’s eyes.” “They wanted to stand the system on its head,” recalls Helen Anderson, one of John’s classmates. “But, in truth, they were just fuckups.”
The school instituted a “do as you please” policy, which meant that regular lectures, seminars, and workshops were scheduled but not entirely mandatory. Students worked at their own pace on a variety of projects that were presented to a tutor for evaluation every Friday afternoon. In every respect, John should have flourished in those circumstances. All those years spent under the thumb of Aunt Mimi and hostile masters, all those rules and requirements meant to stifle creativity, should have been enough to unleash his inspiration. And yet, ultimately, that was his undoing. Attitude and rebellion were essential to the creative process, but eventually he had to confront the essence of the college and produce a portfolio of art.
For John, that couldn’t have been further from his reach. His lack of versatility, inexplicably overlooked by the school’s admissions officers, became a tremendous handicap. Recalled his friend and classmate Jonathan Hague: “John was absolutely untalented as far as serious art went. Part of the problem was that he was incredibly lazy… but he was also terribly out of his depth. He had to resit the lettering course, which was the most elementary of disciplines; he made a mockery of composition and was incapable of doing a serious perspective drawing. Clearly, he was mixed up. He wanted to do well, and yet he couldn’t.”
Overwhelmed, John withdrew into a snug, sullen shell. “His paintings were always very thick, slapped-on things,” recalls Helen Anderson, who sat next to him in the third-floor classroom redolent of oil and turpentine. “He worked very quickly and got bored in no time. It was all scrub-scrub-scrub, then he’d walk away and have a smoke or start screaming his head off, acting the goat, to make everybody around him laugh.” He focused almost singularly on drawing cartoons, “endless cartoons”—distinctive “troggy-type figures” and scribble-scrabble characteristic of the technique he’d acquired from Ivan Vaughan, which were dismissed by the faculty as infantile and pointless. But the cartoons confirmed a pattern of drafting skills that were on par with the best of his lettering classmates. Bill Harry has concluded that “he was an illustrator in the mold of [Saul] Steinberg, but no one was willing to develop his talent.”
Things only worsened when Sutcliffe wandered into John’s life class, looking for an empty seat and easel where he could paint. Stuart was the genuine article; one only had to glance at his painting to be convinced of it. Formerly “besotted” with Cézanne and van Gogh, whose work he once emulated, Stuart had moved on—and tunneled in—experimenting with abstraction in order to develop a personal style that would carry him past the amateur level. According to Rod Murray, “he was painting like the American painters of the time—de Kooning and Rothko—although where they were nonfigurative, Stuart’s work was still based on images.” Helen Anderson recalls the material he turned out that year as being “very aggressive… with dark, moody colors, not at all the type of painting you’d expect from such a quiet fellow.” Stuart’s work made John feel more insecure than ever about his own skills. He tried woefully to overcome this reaction, but Stuart, whose determination and ambition were never well concealed, was a poster boy for the art college that John found so formidable. He had the glow, and it stung like hell.
Nothing quite captured John’s outlook as succinctly as a scene Hague observed one afternoon in 1957, at a time when first-year students were expected to choose an area of concentration. “I remember John being dragged out of class into a passageway by a teacher in the metalwork department who was positively irate,” he says. The way Hague recalls it, the man was “grilling him for making no effort at all,” and John, hands dug securely into his pockets to avoid an impulsive response, was growing more distant by the moment. Slouching against the wall, he stared, unseeing, out the window, not really looking at anything but squarely off in some distant reverie, someplace silent, his own. The man lit into him unmercifully, chiding John, dredging up each shortcoming he’d observed, as though reading from a bill of particulars. Unable to stand it any longer, John lunged toward the teacher and exclaimed: “If you have to know, I don’t really want to be an artist—or have anything to do with art!” Absolutely flabbergasted, the man replied, “Well, what do you think you’ll end up doing?” glaring at this insolent young student as one would a deranged patient. John looked him straight in the eye and, with utter conviction, said, “I’m going to be a rock ’n roll singer.”
[IV]
Paul’s debut appearance with the Quarry Men—on October 18, 1957—was anything but auspicious. The band had been booked to entertain at a Conservative Club social held at New Clubmoor Hall, in the Norris Green section of Liverpool. Norris Green was considered “a posh neighborhood,” so to mark the event, John and Paul decided on “smartening up” their look. Says Colin Hanton: “They started talking about white jackets, the idea being that we [should] look like a group.” It sounded like a great idea; the band was all for it, a step up from “looking like a bunch of ragamuffins” onstage. But after some discussion, it was agreed that John and Paul would get the jackets, “creamy-colored, tweedy sportcoats,” subsidized by the rest of the band at the rate of “half a crown a week, collected by Nigel [Walley] until the bill was paid”; the rest would wear white shirts with tassels and black piping and black bootlace ties. Whether that decision was due to the expense of new jackets or the caliber of talent, no one is certain; however, it established Lennon and McCartney as partners and the band’s enduring front men.
Determined to make an impression, Paul had been boning up for the gig, “practicing relentlessly,” according to a friend. For days before the show the boys tooled around Liverpool, chauffered by a well-to-do friend named Arthur Wong, in the flashy new Vauxhall he’d gotten for his seventeenth birthday. Everyone was “larking around”—smoking and wisecracking and howling at girls—except McCartney. Huddled with his guitar in the spacious backseat, oblivious to all the hijinks, Paul worked out the signature riff to “Raunchy,” an instrumental single by sax virtuoso Bill Justis that was burning up the radio. “Every damn minute, he would be picking at it until we threatened to toss him and the guitar out of the car,” recalls Charles Roberts, who had crawled decisively into the front seat to escape the torturous drone. It was unlikely that he’d finish it in time for the gig, and even less so that John would give him the opportunity for a solo. But Paul simply could not think of anything else.
On that fateful evening, halfway through the show, John introduced the newest member of the band before launching into a version of “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” which showcased Paul’s deliberate pickwork. But when the time came for him to step out front, he suffered an attack of butterfingers, missing his cue. Then, trying to catch up to the rhythm section, he pecked haphazardly at the strings, hitting clam after clam until the whole arrangement caved in like a soufflé.
“At first we were embarrassed,” says Colin Hanton, “just really uncomfortable with what had happened. John insisted on a certain degree of professionalism. And now the new guy made us look worse than the amateurs we were.”
It was all Paul could do to slink back a few steps, in an attempt to disappear in the narrow space between Hanton and Len Garry. John, who took great personal pride in the Quarry Men, was momentarily startled. Normally, this provoked a dagger stare of disgust—or worse. “I thought he was going to lay into him something fierce,” Hanton says. But the pitiful sight of Paul cut right through his rancor. “Paul McCartney—normally so confident, so cocky, so graceful even ill at ease that you wanted to hate him—looked so deflated. Why, John laughed so hard, he almost pissed himself.”
To the band’s surprise, the promoter invited them back to perform on other bills, both at New Clubmoor and Wilson Hall, in Garston. Garston was what the Woolton boys called a “no-go area,” a notoriously rough council estate near the docks where the Fyffe banana boats were unloaded, and Wilson Hall was its deepest, darkest site. “You could have your ass kicked there, just for having an ass,” says Mike Rice, a friend of John’s from Quarry Bank who accompanied the band on two dates toward the end of 1957. Rice recalls following the lads into the band room there, where promoter Charlie McBain (known as Charlie Mac) gave each of them a shilling—their first official fee—which they tucked into their shoes “so they could get out without being robbed.” Adding to Wilson Hall’s reputation was its status as a teddy boy hangout. The audience swaggered in there dressed to kill and dying to jive—followed by a good old-fashioned brawl at the slightest provocation. You could almost set your watch by it: invariably toward the end of each evening, after a particularly overheated song, a ring would expand around two rivals who had squared off and begun to snap. No one needed an excuse to swing on a mate, especially if he’d brought along a sand-filled sock for just the occasion, and rock ’n roll provided the perfect soundtrack, working the teds into a lather. “The bus station was literally across the street, and we knew the exact time the last number sixty-six left for Woolton,” recalls Eric Griffiths. “So one of us would stand watch, with the others lined up behind him. Then, with a half a minute to go, we’d make a run for it.”
The gigs more than made up for the danger. The Quarry Men loved playing to those packed houses, willing to take their chances with the teds because they loved to entertain. They would finish a song, maybe play it over again, faster and looser for effect, then tear into the next one without waiting for applause. If things got hairy, with “blokes waiting for an excuse to thump” them, John would invariably lunge into some superfluous riff, distracting them until the situation calmed down.
If the Quarry Men were inexperienced or self-conscious—as, by all means, they were—they gave no sign of it. They pushed ahead, promoting themselves for dances as if the demand—and their reputation—warranted it. But there were better bands for any promoter who might be looking. Nigel Walley scoured the city for fresh venues, no matter how shabby or unprestigious the room, and chased down any source, including private parties, that presented live acts. Occasionally Charlie McBain would call, offering a weeknight at one of his dances, but aside from a few scattered dates, the Quarry Men were dormant through the end of the year.
Although the band was stalled, it did nothing to brake the speed at which John and Paul’s relationship was developing. The two boys spent part of every day together, talking about music. Often, after school or on the errant day off, John would invite Paul back to his house, in Woolton, where they would hole up in the tiny front bedroom, smoking and playing records. Out from under Mimi’s watchful eye, they would sit cross-legged on the bed, running down bits of lyrics they’d memorized in an attempt to piece together an entire song, working a new chord into their slight repertoire. “We spent hours just listening to the stars we admired,” John recalled. “We’d sit round and look all intent and intense and then, when the record had ended, we [sic] try and reproduce the same sort of sounds for ourselves.” Paul’s pet expression for it—“just bashing away”—seems appropriate; they found ways to play songs using what little they knew about chord structure or technique. Other days they’d meet outside the art college and take the no. 86 bus together all the way out to Forthlin Road. During the week, while Jim was away selling cotton, they had the run of the house. Alone in the sun-filled living room—John on the chintz-covered sofa, and Paul curled into an easy chair at its side—they poured out all their big dreams: the kind of band they envisioned putting together, the musical possibilities that lay in store, the great possibilities if they worked. John talked, in fact, about playing serious gigs, even making records. Anyone eavesdropping might have written off these plans as teenage fantasies. Still, other teenagers had somehow pulled it off: Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry. Sure, they were all Americans, but that had to change sometime.
During their sessions, Paul shared with John the jewels from his “very diverse little record collection” and pointed him toward singers such as the Coasters and Larry Williams, the hard-pounding session piano player for Specialty Records, who may not “have [had] quite as an identifiable voiceas [Little] Richard” but could rip off gems like “Short Fat Fanny” or “Bony Maronie” with the same manic pitch. John hooked right in and fed off the energy. He and Paul had remarkably similar tastes; they liked it fast, hard, and loose. Black music hit them both the same way, too, especially the wild-sounding, primitive stuff, with lyrics that crackled with innuendo: Bo Diddley, Lloyd Price, and Big Joe Turner made an impression. Later, as the Beatles, they would roll all of it into their presentation, riffing on Chuck Berry, the Miracles, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis—so many of the early innovators. But for now, they were just trying to take it all in.
A rhythm developed between John and Paul that got stronger and tighter. Mostly it was intuitive, unspoken. They understood each other. There were unknowns but no mysteries. “They were on the same indefinite path,” says Eric Griffiths, who sensed that their bonding signaled his undoing. “Once they got together, things became serious—and fast. The band was supposed to be a laugh; now they devoted all their attention to it and in a more committed way than any of us really intended.” Other Quarry Men also recognized their special rapport. In Colin Hanton’s estimation: “The band quickly became John and Paul. It was always John and Paul, Paul and John. Even when someone didn’t turn up to rehearse, John and Paul would be at it, harmonizing or arranging material, practicing, either at Auntie Mimi’s or at Paul’s house.”
No doubt about it, they were tuned to the same groove. But aside from a musical passion and amiability, they filled enormous gaps in each other’s lives. Where John was impatient and careless, Paul was a perfectionist—or, at least, appeared to be—in his methodical approach to music and the way he dealt with the world. Where John was moody and aloof, Paul was blithe and outgoing, gregarious, and irrepressibly cheerful. Where John was straightforward if brutally frank, Paul practiced diplomacy to manipulate a situation. Where John had attitude, Paul’s artistic nature was a work in progress. Where John’s upbringing was comfortably middle-class (according to musician Howie Casey, “the only claim he had to being a working-class hero was on sheet music”), Paul was truly blue-collar. Where John was struggling to become a musician, Paul seemed born to it.
And John gave Paul someone to look up to. Their age difference and the fact that John was in art college—a man of the world!—made John “a particularly attractive character” in Paul’s eyes. There was a feral force in his manner, a sense of “fuck it all” that emanated great strength. He had a style of arrogance that dazed people and started things in motion. And he scorned any sign of fear. John’s response to any tentativeness was a sneer, a sneer with humbling consequences.
John occasionally felt the need to reinforce his dominance, but he never required that Paul cede his individuality. He gave the younger boy plenty of room in which to leave his imprint. The Quarry Men would try a new song, and John would immediately seek Paul’s opinion. He’d allow Paul to change keys to suit his register, propose certain variations, reconfigure arrangements. “After a while, they’d finish each other’s sentences,” Eric Griffiths says. “That’s when we knew how strong their friendship had become. They’d grown that dependent on one another.”
Dependent—and unified. They consolidated their individual strengths into a productive collaboration and grew resentful of those who questioned it. Thereafter, it was John and Paul who brought in all the new material; they assigned each musician his part, chose the songs, sequenced the sets—they literally dictated how rehearsals went down. “The rest of us hadn’t a clue as far as arrangements went,” Hanton says slowly. “And they seemed to have everything right there, at their fingertips, which was all right by me, because their ideas were good and I enjoyed playing with them.” But the two could be unforgiving and relentless. “Say the wrong thing, contradict them, and you were frozen out. A look would pass between them, and afterwards it was as if you didn’t exist.”
Even in social situations, the Lennon-McCartney bond seemed well defined. The unlikely pair spent many evenings together browsing through the record stacks in the basement of NEMS, hunting for new releases that captured the aggressiveness, the intensity, and the physical tug about which they debated talmudically afterward over coffee. Occasionally, John invited Paul and his girlfriend, a Welsh nurse named Rhiannon, to double-date.
To John’s further delight, he discovered that Paul was corruptible. In no time, he groomed his young cohort to shoplift cigarettes and candy, as well as stimulating in him an appetite for pranks. On one occasion that still resonates for those involved, the Quarry Men went to a party in Ford, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool, out past the Aintree Racecourse. “John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins,” says Charles Roberts, who met them en route on the upper deck of a cherry red Ripple bus. “It was like the rest of us didn’t exist.” They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner, Roberts recalls. And it wasn’t just music on their agenda, but mischief. “In the middle of the party they went out, ostensibly looking for a cigarette machine, and appeared some time later carrying a cocky-watchman’s lamp.* The next morning, when it was time to leave, we couldn’t get out of the house because [they] had put cement stolen from the roadworks into the mortise lock so the front door wouldn’t open. And we had to escape through a window.”
Through the rest of the year and into the brutal cold spell that blighted early February—every day that winter seemed more blustery than the last—the two boys reinforced the parameters of their friendship. After-school hours were set aside for practice and rehearsal, with weekends devoted to parties and the random gig. It left little time for studies, but then neither boy was academically motivated anyway.
Paul especially began to distinguish himself on guitar. He had a real feel for the instrument, not just for strumming it but for subtle nuances like vamping on the strings with the heel of his hand to create an organic chukka-chukka rhythm—inspired by listening to those high-voltage Eddie Cochran records—and accenting chords with single bass notes inserted between changes to create the kind of dramatic phrasing that became synonymous with the distinctive, undulating bass lines in his later work. John’s technique was more spontaneous, more relaxed. “He had a way of just banging out a few chords and making it sound cool,” observes one of the Woolton gang. “Any song, no matter if he knew it or not—John would barrel right through it.” Notes mattered less to him than feel, structure less than sound. Paul’s precise efforts, on the other hand, provided a measure of syntax and kept songs from sounding too slapped together.
Sometime in late February, Paul went back to picking out the fairly uncomplicated instrumental “Raunchy,” playing the melody line over and over until it was nearly note-perfect. The song, by Sun Records A&R man Bill Justis, had been one of the first pop instrumentals to smash through the Top Ten that year, and its repetitive but catchy guitar lick, supporting what was basically an alto sax showcase, made it instantly familiar—and danceable. It seemed like a natural addition to the Quarry Men’s repertoire. Paul had been looking for another solo spot to redeem his fumbled debut, but there was more to it than self-esteem. He had heard another boy play it, a fifteen-year-old schoolmate whom he had befriended two years earlier, and he wanted to master it first, to maintain their friendly rivalry. He almost had it down—almost. But it wasn’t quite there yet.
And not until it was dead-on would he play it for George Harrison.