Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life Read online

  The Quarrymen played their first paid gig August 7, 1957, downstairs at the Cavern Club on Mathew Street in downtown Liverpool. (McCartney, however, was absent, away at Scout camp with his brother, Michael, in the village of Hathersage, seventy-one miles east.) A trad-jazz fan named Alan Sytner had started the club the previous January as a hangout for like-minded purists, and he was wary that rock ’n’ roll would attract rough customers. (In America, there was a lot of talk among adults about rock ’n’ roll promoting “juvenile delinquency,” code for the interracial mixing and degraded behavior that would inevitably result from this musical miscegenation.) Nigel Walley arranged the booking through his job as an apprentice golf caddie at Lee Park. Alan Sytner’s father, a doctor who played golf at Lee Park, liked Walley and put him in touch with his son. Sytner agreed to book the band, but only provisionally, as an opening act. Skiffle was fine, but Sytner gave the Quarrymen stern orders not to stray. Stylistic tribes were as passionate as religious denominations, even at that early stage.

  Disregarding Sytner’s instructions, Lennon played not just the Del Vikings’ “Come Go with Me,” but Presley’s “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” Sytner sent a curt note from the bar: “Cut out the bloody rock!”16 They were not invited back. Sytner joined the line of skeptics to be converted.

  A few weeks later, Lennon entered Liverpool Art College. At sixteen in September of 1957, his persona had all the bluster of a full-blown Teddy Boy: greased hair, drainpipe pants hugging his skinny legs, all framing a loutish attitude. His look struck many of his new college peers as ridiculous, since most of the other students styled themselves as turtlenecked bohemians and weren’t hung up on looking tough. McCartney was a year behind Lennon and still in school at the Liverpool Institute, which was right next door to the art college. Daily music sessions continued without a hitch.

  The intermediate art curriculum Lennon enrolled in followed traditional lines: he would spend the first two years studying lettering, drawing, composition and perspective, and life drawing; once he’d mastered the basics, his final two years would concentrate on independent work. Art history was not required, and an emphasis on representation and body form was the rule. Most students hoped to go into commercial graphics or design. The most popular classes involved life drawing of nudes, and one day Lennon reportedly sat on model June Furlong’s naked lap. The curriculum offered no classes in cartooning, and Liverpool Art College had yet to catch up with the modernist movements—abstract expressionism, conceptual art, pop art—exploding in New York and London. For the first two-year course, students were expected to attend classes, submit portfolios for review in their chosen specialization, and consult with tutors about their future direction. Upon graduation, a national diploma in art and design was conferred, with various ranks awarded for different levels of accomplishment.

  If Lennon stood out as a Ted, Stuart Sutcliffe, who exuded a quiet charisma through black leather, quickly trumped his image. Sutcliffe was by far the most talented painter in the class, the kind of standout even the faculty deferred to. Having just turned seventeen, he was at least a year younger than most of the other students, admitted early for his stunning portfolio. Lennon quickly gravitated toward him. Soon after McCartney became Lennon’s musical intimate, Stuart became his artistic soul mate.

  Sutcliffe took the bus in from Huyton, across the Mersey from Liverpool, a neighborhood regarded by most Liverpudlians as the “tony” side of town. His childhood years were stable yet complicated. Sutcliffe’s mother, née Martha Cronin, called Millie, fell in love with Charles Ferguson Sutcliffe while he was still married to his first wife. But that was only their first hurdle: where the creative and strong-minded Millie was Catholic, Charles was a Protestant, the same vast cultural gulf Jim and Mary McCartney traversed. Once Charles divorced his first wife, both families disowned them, which gives Millie some resemblance to Julia Stanley. The couple moved to London and Manchester before settling in Edinburgh, where Charles worked as a marine engineer for the John Brown shipyard. Stuart came along shortly after they settled in their “elegant, sophisticated” home on Chalmers Street in 1940; sister Joyce followed in 1942. The following year, Stuart’s father was drafted as “an essential war worker” by the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead. He brought his family down to Merseyside and moved them into public housing on Sedbergh Drive, Huyton, in 1943.17 Another sister, Pauline, was born there, on January 8, 1944—Elvis Presley’s birthday, as Stu liked to point out. This youngest child wrote two important memoirs, Backbeat, in 1994, followed by The Beatles’ Shadow: Stuart Sutcliffe and His Lonely Hearts Club, in 2002.

  The Sutcliffe household could not have been more different from Mimi Smith’s house. The Sutcliffe parents were not especially concerned about traditional notions of respectability and conventional behavior, and they prized the arts and intellectual fields. “We grew up surrounded by books, paintings and music,” Pauline Sutcliffe writes in The Beatles’ Shadow. “My parents had studied piano as small children and were always playing, and my father did his turn [as pianist] in a dance band and at the cinema for the silent movies.”18 Like John’s mother, Julia, Millie was an original. An asthmatic who never stopped smoking, she worked as a Roman Catholic schoolteacher, traveling across Liverpool to her school by tram with her inhaler and pills to treat her sudden attacks. For her, domestic duties were “boring”; she preferred recording the minutes of Labour Party meetings in Huyton, where she befriended future prime minister Harold Wilson.

  Like John, Stu attended Sunday school, although the Roman Catholic variety; and he sang in the church choir at St. Gabriel’s in Huyton “until his voice broke.”19 Pauline recalls lively household discussions: “I could tell the distinctions between a Bevanite and a Gaitskellite [Scottish accents] as easily as the distinction between an Elvis or a Cliff Richard fan.”20 All three children took piano lessons.

  Sutcliffe’s prodigious talent and painterly mind-set stirred something new in Lennon. While he took art school about as seriously as he’d taken the rest of his formal education, he glimpsed something larger in Sutcliffe’s dedication to painting, and adopted romantic heroes like Van Gogh as his own. In the subversive Scouser style, Lennon became as suspicious of art-school self-importance as he did of musical elitism: to him, anything that smacked of pretension was all guff. Jazz was a favorite target, especially since most jazz musicians and fans sneered at early rock. “We were always anti-jazz,” Lennon later told Hunter Davies:

  I think it is shit music, even more stupid than rock and roll, followed by people like students in cheap pullovers. Jazz never gets anywhere, never does anything, it’s always the same and all they do is drink pints of beer. We hated jazz particularly because in the early days they wouldn’t let us play at clubs, as they only wanted jazz. We’d never get auditions because of the jazz bands.21

  To Lennon, rock ’n’ roll was loaded with ideas, and was all the more attractive because “intellectuals” found it so easy to dismiss. (And note that disarming bit of Lennon dismissing jazzers as drunks.) Soon Lennon was hanging out with his art crowd at all hours of the day and night, in the common room or the cafeteria, at the pubs Ye Cracke, the Philharmonic down Hope Street from the art college, or the Jacaranda coffee bar, which was run by a raffish twenty-nine-year-old Welshman, Allan Williams, in his converted basement. Williams hired a group called the Royal Caribbean Band to play into the night, and turned “the Jac” into a hub of after-hours student life.

  Since the Liverpool Institute (“the Innie”) sat just next door, McCartney would stop by the Liverpool Art College canteen at lunchtime, which became a key rehearsal period for the Quarrymen. McCartney made his debut with the group on October 18, 1957, at New Clubmoor Hall, the Conservative Club in (Back) Broadway, Liverpool. This gig was booked by Charlie McBain, who also booked Wilson Hall in the working-class suburb of Garston, the Garston Swimming Baths (renowned as “the Blood Baths,” where rival gangs would often erupt into fighting), Holyake Hall in Wave
rtree, and Wavertree Town Hall. McBain wound up giving the Beatles plenty of work in the next five years.22 Also that same fall of 1957, the Quarrymen entered the Carroll Levis talent show at the Empire Theatre, without advancing.

  It was at one of these Liverpool venues, purportedly Wilson Hall, in February 1958, that George Harrison first heard the group play.23 Harrison was only fourteen, one of four children who lived way out in Speke, where the McCartneys once had lived. George’s father was a bus driver named Harold, and his mother, Louise, liked to tune the family radio to hear special BBC broadcasts of Indian classical music.

  Harrison had attended Dovedale Primary School several years behind Lennon without meeting him and was now a year behind McCartney at the Liverpool Institute. Paul and George already played Lonnie Donegan numbers together informally at Harrison’s house, and continued meeting up on their daily bus to the Innie. George sat at the back and noodled on his guitar. One day, McCartney heard him mimic “Raunchy,” the loping Western instrumental made popular by Memphis guitarist Bill Justis, who had supervised Sun Records sessions for Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash. The instrumental spent an unlikely fourteen weeks on the U.S. charts in the fall of 1957, making it Sun’s biggest-selling instrumental to date. “Raunchy” (originally called “Backwoods”) featured a guitar lead on the lower strings, a reversal of most high E-string leads. Justis’s early use of reverb caught a weirdly suggestive new sound, among the many that began pouring from the new electric technology. McCartney heard Harrison reaching for both the melody and its long sustain, even though he played it on an acoustic guitar. Impressed, McCartney had Harrison play “Raunchy” for Lennon, who admitted a grudging respect for his abilities. Although Harrison was already playing guitar for a jazz group called the Les Stewart Quartet, he joined up with the Quarrymen. Soon after, he brought them a gig: the band played for the wedding of George’s brother Harry at the Harrisons’ house in Speke in December 1958.

  The Quarrymen bumped along like many an amateur outfit during this phase, stringing together appearances at family events and hitting up employers. After Harry Harrison’s wedding reception on December 20, 1958, they brought in New Year’s Day, 1959, playing for Harrison’s father’s Speke Bus Depot Social Club’s belated Christmas party at Wilson Hall in Garston. That summer they learned about a new club opening up in West Derby called the Casbah Coffee Club—a project driven by a local eccentric named Mona Best, who decided the local youth culture could use some juice and turned her large basement into a dance hall. Born in India, the daughter of a British army officer, Mona had married Joe Best, a sportswriter for the Liverpool Echo. Together they raised two boys, Pete, who wore a huge pompadour atop smoldering good looks, and Rory, three years younger. Pete Best, who went on to become “the Lost Beatle,” later would write his memoirs, Beatle!, with numerous vivid descriptions of the Merseyside music scene and its characters. The Liverpool Echo ran a story announcing the “Kasbah’s” opening, along with a photo of McCartney and Lennon performing as Cynthia Powell looked on adoringly.24

  The Quarrymen’s shot at the Casbah had a last-minute twist straight out of some Andy Hardy movie. Ken Brown, bassist for the Les Stewart Quartet, got into an argument with Stewart, who walked out on the opening-night gig. Desperate, Brown asked Harrison if he knew any musicians who might be willing to fill in at the last minute. Harrison “rounded up” Paul and John, invited Brown into the band, and the Quarrymen played the Casbah that night and every Saturday slot through October 10, 1959, for three pounds per performance—seventy-five pence per member. Brown’s last night as a Quarryman came when Mona Best tried to pay him for a set he had sat out upstairs due to illness. (Why he bothered to show up with a heavy cold goes unexplained.) McCartney protested: why should Brown get paid when he didn’t even perform? John, Paul, and George closed ranks, and that ended their alliance with Brown and, for the moment, the Casbah.25

  After their seven weeks as the Casbah’s main draw, the band (calling themselves, for the occasion, Johnny and the Moondogs) once more entered the Carroll Levis TV Star Search at the Empire Theatre. This time they advanced through two appearances into the finals and performed for the concluding show in Manchester, thirty miles from Liverpool, on November 15. The finale awarded a giant prize at the end of the long evening, based on the readings of an applause meter brought on after all the acts had performed. This arrangement worked against the group: by the time Johnny and the Moondogs were summoned to the stage for their meter reading, John, Paul, and George had boarded the last train home, without enough cash to stay overnight.

  As the three Quarrymen who would become Beatles began to venture into songwriting, they became students of some of the best in the business, tracking composers regardless of who performed their material. While they particularly admired writer-performers like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, they also tracked Brill Building tunesmiths like Atlantic’s Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, whose credits dominated recordings by Elvis Presley (“Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock”), Little Richard (“Kansas City”), and the Coasters (“Searchin’ ” and “Yakety Yak”), all of which rolled right into the Quarrymen’s set lists. Along the way, learning these numbers taught them not just how to play but how to write, arrange, and harmonize.

  Unfortunately, many of the home tapes from this embryonic period have been lost, with one exception. A certain Bob Molyneaux recorded the Quarrymen—pre-McCartney—playing at the St. Peter’s fête in July 1957. (This recording was first heard commercially more than forty years later, on Anthology 1.) The Grundig reels made by Colin Hanton’s neighbors Geraldine and Colette Davis and another fan, Arthur Wong, all have since been lost or wiped. Some April 1960 recordings from the McCartney home on Forthlin Road have leaked, but not “When I’m Sixty-four.”

  The Quarrymen cut their first piece of vinyl, with McCartney and Harrison, in the drawing room of Percy Phillips’s house in the late spring or early summer of 1958. Phillips, a local inventor and tinkerer, had invested in a primitive disc-cutting setup: a reel-to-reel tape recorder, an amplifier, a four-channel mixer, and a disc cutter that carved the results into hot lacquer. Local acts were recorded in Phillips’s living room while he monitored the bulky machine; then he transferred the analog recording onto a ten-inch shellac, a thick vinyl disc. Harrison found out about the setup through his friend Johnny Byrne, a local guitarist who had made a record there earlier that year. Once it became apparent that you could sign up, pay your money, and take home an actual platter, the idea was irresistible: an actual record they could pass around . . . perhaps even send off to London and impress a label. “It was a big deal for all of us,” Colin Hanton remembered many years later.26

  Paul and John jointly decided to lead with “That’ll Be the Day.” Hanton played drums, George played guitar, John and Paul sang lead, and they asked another friend, John Lowe, to round out the sound with some honky-tonk piano. Phillips persuaded them that they’d achieve higher quality if they recorded their two songs to tape and then transferred them to disc, a process that would let them edit out a sloppy cutoff or false start. One version says John and Paul balked because Phillips wanted an extra pound for that service, but finally assented. Another version has them skipping the tape to cut out the extra fee. Each band member wound up paying seventeen shillings and sixpence to make the two-sided, ten-inch 78 rpm disc.

  “That’ll Be the Day” gets over on high spirits, with all the winning humor of Lennon’s enthusiasm and none of the finesse of Holly’s original: they completely miss those distinctive triplet rhythmic kicks on the final refrain. (Since this was the number he’d learned from Judy, it’s tempting to think that he, as Presley did with “Old Shep,” sang his first record for his mother.) For the B side, there was a quarrel about which song to do—until McCartney simply counted off “In Spite of All the Danger,” a slow-tempo original which they never had actually rehearsed. Hanton and Lowe simply joined in, pretending to know their parts, as McCartney and Harrison banged ou
t the tune they had fixed up together and Lennon chimed in.

  For a group of mid-teenagers, at a time when the most successful acts typically did not write their own songs, it was beyond hubris to include one of their own compositions on a demo they hoped would get them a recording contract. “In Spite of All the Danger,” a simple ditty that aims toward country peril with none of the pathos, gives you a good idea of their rough but earnest level of playing by this stage: some practiced guitar licks from George, and the hints of a vocal blend between John and Paul that would sound different with every record. As the only song ever credited jointly to Paul McCartney and George Harrison, it sets up an intrigue within the group, the first indication of a triangular power struggle. The song was largely McCartney’s, but George’s guitar solo lent a lanky ambition to the sound, and McCartney shared songwriting credit with Harrison as recognition. For the first time, all three Beatles are singing: Lennon and McCartney duetting, with Harrison providing backup “aaah”s and meek yet precise guitar work.

  From then on, all the early original songs the group released were credited to Lennon and McCartney, which begs the question: did Lennon suddenly realize that he longed for that songwriting credit? (One early number, “Cry for a Shadow,” gets attributed to Lennon and Harrison.) In the Anthology, McCartney recalls a conversation considering a three-way songwriting partnership with Harrison, “but we decided no, it would just be us two.” Either McCartney quickly decided that Harrison’s solo shouldn’t amount to a writing credit, or his kinship with Lennon, and their productive chemistry, simply settled this question.