Muscle and Sinew Muscle and SinewSome ideas seem so obvious when they are presented that you just naturally assume a proprietary right to them. That was how John Lennon felt when George Lee proposed they form a skiffle band. Lee, a fifth-year Quarry Bank student with dark, curly hair, encountered John and Eric Griffiths during their lunch hour one day in early March 1957. The three boys shared a congenial smoke out by the bike shed and “began chatting about music in earnest”—what songs they especially liked, which artists they admired, whose arrangements were most compelling.
At a point near the end of the conversation, George Lee, brimming with enthusiasm, suggested that they pursue their passion in a more active, enterprising manner. “We should start our own skiffle band!” he blurted out, as if it were a completely revolutionary idea. In fact, the phenomenon had caught fire in Liverpool months before, with new bands sighted more frequently than steamships, but it was still relatively rare at Quarry Bank. As early as February a school group had formed there called the Kingfishers, more noted for its trailblazing than its talent; otherwise, they were on virgin ground.
A skiffle band: John was intrigued, to put it mildly. It made so much sense, “he had difficulty concentrating on anything else that day.” After school, he and Eric bicycled breathlessly to George Lee’s house for some further discussion. “We should form our own band,” he told Eric afterward on the sidewalk, safely out of Lee’s earshot, signifying a sudden shift in personnel. By Eric’s own admission, they considered George Lee “a fancy little character” who should be rejected simply “because he wasn’t part of our gang.” Moreover, they sensed that Lee’s excitement was just a whim. “John and I took it seriously,” Griffiths insists; there was no room in the picture for fence-sitters. (Undeterred, Lee eventually started a competing band, the Bluebirds.) They both had new guitars, and John began accompanying Eric to lessons in Hunt’s Cross, where their painstaking teacher “aspired to make us guitarists, when all we wanted was to play a few chords and start ‘blues-ing.’ ”
After two lessons, John had had enough. He responded wretchedly to anything structured, and guitar instruction was no exception. There were too many rules, not enough instant payoffs. Ever resourceful, Julia knew exactly how to resolve the matter. As an adequate banjo player, Griffiths says, “she retuned our guitar strings to the banjo and we decided to play, from then on, [by] using banjo chords.” That meant they “tuned the bottom three strings all the same,” according to Rod Davis, who over the years has mastered a number of stringed instruments, “and played banjo chords on the top four strings,” which simplified the process. “It took me about two years, on and off, to be able to strum tunes without thinking,” John recalled.
“John picked it up easier than me,” Griffiths says. “[He] was more musical than me in terms of… sorting out what the chords were.” Julia taught them how to play G, C, and D7, which was enough to accompany any number of popular songs. To get them started, she applied the triad to “Ain’t That a Shame,” Fats Domino’s first hit, and demonstrated the method, singing along in a carefree, zesty voice.*
With that much under their belt, John and Eric were soon working out their own informal arrangements. After school, they met at Menlove Avenue, holed up in the parlor or upstairs in John’s bedroom, where they tried learning, without much success, other rock ’n roll songs they’d heard on the radio. “We were [too] limited by the few chords [we knew],” Griffiths recalls. Normally, this would have produced divots of frustration, although in this case the boys hit on an alternative. Griffiths, who was as headstrong and only slightly less impatient than John, suggested they switch gears, perhaps try something simpler. As they soon discovered, playing “Rock Island Line” was a cinch using the three basic chords. It required little skill and few nimble changes to pull off, providing something of a confidence boost. The same went for “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Alabamy Bound,” and “Cumberland Gap.” As they progressed, John and Eric responded by shuffling a selection of manageable rock ’n roll numbers into their skiffle repertoire, simplifying the form of “That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Mean Woman Blues” to suit their meager ability.
John threw himself into the practices, which took place daily after school, usually at Mendips or occasionally at Eric’s house on Halewood Drive. He was completely uninhibited about singing, belting out each number the way he imagined an entertainer would deliver it. But John’s was a provincial voice, hundreds of miles away from the urban toughness of his heroes. It was achingly beautiful and honest in a way that underscored its raw vulnerability, and yet the delivery was powerful—there was a clear quality of whimsy that shadowed each line he sang, a kind of half-cast vocal smirk juxtaposed with stinging emotion, as though it weren’t enough simply to sing a lyric when you could comment on it as well. “John was a born performer,” Griffiths says without equivocation. “You could sense that when he sang. It lifted him, he was energized [by it].”
Both boys soon grew dissatisfied with their after-school practice sessions. They were too confining; nor were they social, expressive, or theatrical enough. “We wanted to play to people,” Griffiths says. “That was our objective from the start. It didn’t matter where we performed, either, as long as we were playing in front of [an audience].” When John finally announced that it was time to assemble a band, Eric didn’t so much as blink.
There were few things that Pete Shotton put beyond his best friend, but when John invited him to join a skiffle band, he was dumbfounded. They had been walking across the field out beyond Quarry Bank High School, ruminating over some musical triviality, when John confronted him with it in much the same way he asked about dancing class. “Should we start a band, then, Pete?” he asked evasively. Shotton, who hadn’t a scintilla of musical ability, assumed John was making fun of him. He cursed and snapped, “I can’t be bothered!” But a trace of rejection in John’s face warned Pete that he’d misread the situation. Laughing to recover the bonhomie, Shotton said, “Don’t be silly—I can’t play anything.” That was all it took to revive John. Instantly, the fantasy was rekindled. “It doesn’t matter,” John said encouragingly. “You can get a tea chest [washtub] or a washboard and just have a plunk-plunk. We’ll sing our songs… like on the Bank. We can have a laugh, right? Let’s have a laugh.”
Upon hearing about the band, Pete’s mother, Bessie, contributed a washboard she found in the shed, along with some thimbles from her sewing gear. “Mum was very supportive of this,” he recalls, despite the fact that she considered “cheeky” John Lennon to be a “bad influence on her beloved son. She liked the fact we were doing something constructive… and the idea of her son [being] in a band was thrilling [to her].”
But Pete secretly loathed the undertaking. While he shared John’s love of music and the package it came wrapped in, he “absolutely hated” the idea of participating in a band. For one thing, he was shy in front of strangers, mortified by having to stand up in public and sing, “playing this silly piece of tin.” That he wasn’t musical caused him to feel humiliated in front of his more talented friends; strafed by this insecurity, he was convinced, albeit wrongly, that it diminished him in their eyes. But he was John’s best mate, determined to give his friend what Mimi had thus far refused to provide: encouragement, even at the expense of his own displeasure.
Shotton, in turn, persuaded another classmate and neighbor, Bill Smith, to throw in with them. Smith, like Pete, had no musical experience, which didn’t detract from his eligibility; what he had was an old washtub that proved expendable and was thereby coveted by the band. By attaching a broomstick-and-rope getup to it, one could simulate a bass sound merely by leaning one way or the other, adjusting the rope’s tension and plucking. Truthfully, it made no difference what note was played as long as the constant thumping provided some grave, resonant bottom—a trick that Smith, or just about anybody, could pull off.
Meanwhile, Eric Griffiths recruited Rod Davis to play banjo. The instrument was an oddity—a five-string Windsor model, unusual because it replaced the standard extra peg on the neck with a brass tube that conveyed the fifth string from the neck to the machine head, but for £5 there had been no reason for Davis to pass it up. “I took it to school [that] Monday,” Davis recalls, and encountering Eric Griffiths, he exclaimed, “Eric, I got a banjo yesterday.” Griffiths, who was eager to get the band under way, seized the opportunity. “Oh,” he said, “do you want to be in a group?” Davis was caught off guard, not only by the invitation but by Griffith’s apparent lack of interest in whether he could even play the banjo. Davis reminded his friend that he couldn’t so much as finger a chord. Griffiths assured him that it wouldn’t be a problem.
“Count me in,” he eventually told Griffiths, and made plans to attend a practice after school, at Pete Shotton’s house.
There were too many boys to assemble inside the Shottons’ house on Vale Road, so Pete’s mother sent them out back, to the garden, where an old corrugated-iron bomb shelter, exposed on one whole side, stood abandoned in the leaves. It was bitter cold in the yard, not for the fainthearted, and the four boys, bundled in sweaters, huddled under the damp metal shell with its reflected light pooled between them, hugging their shoulders and rubbing red, chafed hands in an effort to recharge their circulation.
Right away, Lennon took control of things, telling everyone where to stand, how to act, what to play—and when. There was a flow and an authority in the way he spoke that kept the others in thrall. “I remember being very impressed that John had all this in his head,” says Nigel Walley, another childhood friend, who lived in a semi-detached house called Leosdene on Vale Road, halfway between Ivan Vaughan and Pete Shotton, and had stopped by “to see what all the fuss was about.” Since few of the boys had ever had the chance to actually see a skiffle band in action, they were obliged by John’s special knowledge, unaware that his know-how was for the most part intuitive. “He just knew what to do, it was right at his fingertips,” Walley says. “It wasn’t this concept he’d worked out; it came naturally to him. The amazing thing, too, was how effortlessly he got everyone else to follow him.”
The first song they attempted to play was “Rock Island Line” (John had bought a copy of the Donegan single from old Mrs. Roberts, who owned the village record shop, opposite the baths), with John naturally taking the lead. There was never any discussion about who should sing. With his pale face lifted to the light, John barreled through the song, while his befuddled sidemen did everything they could to stay with him. Chords were jumbled unintelligibly, each instrument reeling in its own orbit. They looked clumsy, crowded under the little metal canopy, with everyone flailing away at the strings. All the boys would later agree that the sound was an unadulterated mess, but at the time no one gave it a second thought. The thrill of playing a song together—as a band!—overshadowed their ineptitude. They grinned at one another’s beaming faces, proud and lit from within. By the end of the day, they had plowed through four folk songs, if not with measurable accomplishment, then at least brimming with determination.
Almost as vital as the music was choosing a name for the band. No one is certain who proposed calling them the Blackjacks, but it was approved unanimously and with a measure of deservedness. Eric Griffiths says, “It had the right sound for boys our age—rugged, dark, and American. We tried it on for size, and it just fit like a glove.”
Successive after-school practices produced a solid, if unpolished, set of songs. The Blackjacks learned the entire Donegan songbook, including “Wabash Cannonball,” “Dead or Alive,” “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie,” “John Henry,” “Midnight Special,” “Cumberland Gap,” and “Worried Man Blues.” Even though John sang lead, everyone joined in the choruses. The words were so familiar that, by now, each boy had absorbed them like oxygen. When the sidemen chimed in, “Oh, let the Midnight Special shine her light on me / Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-lovin’ light on me,” the boys puffed out their chests and sang with a faintly forbidden enchantment, their voices, once timid and off-key, rising with a greedy incandescence.
Two weeks later, the quartet discovered that another skiffle band—a group with enough of a reputation to impress the boys—was also called the Blackjacks. With no alternative other than to rename the band, they gathered at Mendips one afternoon—John, Eric, Pete, Rod, and Nigel—for “a mini-brainstorming.” After a time, Pete facetiously suggested a name that apparently clicked. There was a tradition at the end of the term whereby the entire student body would stand in the auditorium and sing the school song. Everyone knew it by rote; they were forced to practice it endlessly during Prep, with Cliff Cook, a woodworking teacher, hammering it stiffly on the piano. “Quarry men, old before our birth / Straining each muscle and sinew…” The Quarry Men. John latched onto it right away, agreeing, “Yep, that sounds good, all right.” But a slight smile betrayed his underlying motivation. The name was nothing if not a send-up of the school. “We’d never strained a muscle or sinew in our life at Quarry Bank,” Shotton gently insists. “So Quarry Men, to me, seemed very appropriate.”
Finding new, fresh material quickly became John’s most pressing goal—and greatest problem. Radio was the most accessible medium, with even the BBC now acquiescing to the skiffle phenomenon, but airplay was still severely limited. Sheet music was scarce, and the cost of records was prohibitive. The only other prospect was going to a record store, where it was possible to preview one or two selections. To John, this was a font of material, and so he, Eric, and Rod joined the other fifth-term Quarry Bank students who climbed over the wall at lunchtime, bought some chips at a shop outside the school grounds, and made the hajj down Harthill Road to the roundabout at Penny Lane, where a branch of the North End Music Store (or NEMS, as it was known) serviced the small community. “You could listen to the odd record there… in a booth,” Davis says, explaining how it was impossible to crib words under the circumstances, “but then they threw [us] out when they realized [we] weren’t buying anything.”
By the end of April, the momentum was broken by the defection of Bill Smith, who proved unreliable and simply stopped showing up for practice. His departure presented no serious threat to the Quarry Men. John and Pete broke into Smith’s garage and “liberated” the tea-chest bass, figuring Bill wouldn’t miss it much.
Smith was promptly replaced by Len Garry, the boys’ singing mate from the Bank, who was now in his last year at the Liverpool Institute, in a class with his friend Ivan Vaughan and Paul McCartney. An easygoing, self-confident, and articulate Woolton lad, Len could also be indifferent to the point of distraction. But, as Griffiths recalled, “he could… pluck the strings of the tea chest as well as anybody. It didn’t matter what [notes] he played—he was acceptable as a person.”
The situation became even more exciting when Eric announced, quite unexpectedly, that he had found a drummer who might be of some use to them. A rarity in Liverpool, principally because of the cost of a set of drums, there was no greater luxury for a skiffle band. Moreover, it would provide them with an opportunity to play some rock ’n roll, which had always been John’s objective. He was beside himself with anticipation.
Griffiths knew Colin Hanton from traveling home with him on the same bus. A little gamecock of a fellow with a quick grin and hair-trigger temper, Hanton commuted regularly from his job as an apprentice at Guy Rogers, an upholstery firm in Speke that operated out of an airy, modern factory that had been used by the RAF during the war to make airplane parts. The boys had exchanged nodding glances at first, in recognition of being neighbors, then fell into genial chitchat, during which, on one occasion, Hanton divulged that he played the drums. “I was very, very amateur, never a good drummer, probably because I never had lessons,” admits Hanton, who beat out rhythms on the wooden furniture as if he were Sonny Liston, as opposed to Buddy Rich.
Hanton leaped at the invitation, but he knew the score. “I was [asked] to join the group simply because I had a set of drums,” he says without a trace of rancor. “It didn’t matter how bad I played.”
Nigel Walley, who felt slightly left out of the configuration, declared himself available to be the band’s manager and vowed to get the Quarry Men work. “I didn’t know the first thing about managing,” Walley admits now, “but no one had the slightest idea how to go about getting gigs.” Walley discovered soon enough that many of the local stores in Woolton Village would accept posters, if they looked professional. “John made up a nice-looking ad in colored inks that said, ‘Country-and-western, rock ’n roll, skiffle band—The Quarry Men—Open for Engagements—Please Call Nigel Walley, Tel. GAtacre 1715,’ ” and they convinced the manager of Mantle’s record shop to place it centrally, in the window. Business cards, printed by Charles Roberts, carried basically the same legend.
Nigel’s early efforts to place the Quarry Men in a paying gig proved fruitless. Still, no one more than John Lennon was convinced that fame and fortune were but a phone call away.
The Quarry Men were too enamored of the spotlight to worry about paying gigs. The experience alone was enough to keep them turning up at practice. There were a number of places they found suitable for rehearsal. Eric Griffiths’s house was usually available during the day: his father, a pilot, had been killed during the war, and his mother worked, so the place was invariably empty. On Saturday afternoons they jammed in Colin Hanton’s living room, on Heyscroft Road, while his mother was out grocery shopping, or they went around the corner to Rod Davis’s. Even Mimi hosted a couple of practices, minus the heavy equipment. “The tea-chest bass and my drums would have been too much for [her],” Hanton points out, so the boys limited rehearsals there to some singing, mindful to “watch [their] p’s and q’s.”
At one time or another, John took each of the boys to Julia’s house in what can only be construed as a Quarry Man rite of passage. The series of unannounced, informal visits wasn’t anything like the ones they’d endured at the Griffiths’ or the Hantons’ or the Davises’, where a rigid decorum was observed. At Julia’s, the boys could be themselves, without worrying about “minding [their] manners.” They could listen to records, play instruments in her parlor, make as much noise as they wanted, smoke and swear. She expected nothing of them in the way of conventional parental respect, except that they heed her wish to “just enjoy [them]selves.” Several of the boys, while completely charmed by the familiarity, didn’t know what to make of her.
“Julia was unlike anyone I’d ever met before,” says Rod Davis, who accompanied John to her house, alone and with the group, on several occasions. “She acted familiar in a way that was almost flirtatious, and yet there was such a clear division of standing. She was John’s mum—that never strayed from anyone’s mind—but her manner and the way she acted around us was more like that of a mate.”
“One time,” Colin Hanton recalls, “I was at Mimi’s, when John developed a problem with some guitar chords, so it was off to his mum’s. Julia immediately got the banjo out and showed him everything he needed to know. If one of the riffs got too complicated, she’d sing things to emphasize what she was trying to explain. I thought, ‘Crikey, this is his mother. They’re talking music!’ It was a lot for a lad like me to digest.”
John tended to forget the distance that separated his friends from Julia. He often talked Shotton and Griffiths into forsaking their school lunch for a surreptitious trip to her house. They’d stock up on chips and cigarettes, then pedal off to Blomfield Road, where they’d flop on the couch like cocker spaniels and listen to records in her sitting room. “She had loads of records—mostly her pop, not our pop,” Shotton recalls. But Eric Griffiths remembers unearthing a cluster of rock ’n roll 78s there, which they devoured like sweets. “In fact, we discovered Gene Vincent there,” he says with certainty. Somehow Julia had gotten her hands on an American issue of “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” which the boys played endlessly until she begged them to stop. Of all the singers John had encountered, next to Elvis, Vincent came closest to possessing his ideal of a rock ’n roll voice—a deathly growl tempered with blatant sexuality and menace wrapped around an outrageous self-image. He didn’t have to see Vincent to grasp the singer’s penchant for black leather, fast bikes, and faster women; it was all right there, on that steamy track. Julia also introduced the boys to records by Shirley and Lee (“Let the Good Times Roll”) and Charlie Gracie (“Butterfly”). It would take some time for those songs to be deciphered and inserted into the Quarry Men’s repertoire to give them more of a rock ’n roll flavor, but the band’s little cushion of material, largely due to Julia’s bohemian taste, was already swinging in that direction.
Throughout April and the rest of May, the Quarry Men accepted any reasonable invitation to play, performing at various friends’ parties. Nothing seemed to discourage the boys; sometimes, the shabbier the place, the more they were able to cut loose. Mike Rice, who was in the C stream at Quarry Bank with John, recalls, “They once came and played in our garage on Manor Way, to the annoyance of all the neighbors. The noise was such that people confronted my parents and forbid the lads from coming back.”
Nigel Walley, acting as the Quarry Men’s manager, sent homemade flyers to operators of the Pavilion Theatre, the Locarno Ballroom, the Rialto, and the Grafton; however, none were quick to respond. “Instead, we played the Gaumont Cinema, near Penny Lane, a couple [of] times,” he recalls, where performers were treated about as respectfully as the beleaguered ushers who patrolled the aisles. “Most Saturday afternoons, they used to have a skiffle group on [during] intermission. They’d show a couple of short films, then have a break [in order] to change projectors, which is when we’d get up. The kids were never quiet; they’d sing along or stand up on their chairs. I don’t know how the lads got through it; John treated it like an important gig, and incredibly no one ever complained.”
Just how good—or bad—the Quarry Men were at those early gigs is difficult to gauge. Few people have any recollection of them. “We were starting to make some music that sounded good,” says Pete Shotton. But Mike Rice, who watched them rehearse at Hanton’s house, thinks they made a “general noise.” And as chaotic as they sounded at practice, he says, they were absolutely lost onstage.
By John’s own admission, the stakes grew higher in front of an audience. There was an undeniable rush to performing, “a sense that you could control a crowd’s emotions with your voice.” Eric Griffiths remembers admiring how comfortably John worked an audience, singing and emoting with an ease that eluded him in other social situations, how he seemed “to loosen up” in the spotlight “like a captive animal released into its natural habitat.”
Encouraged by the band’s progress, John was determined to test this new power under more challenging circumstances. Part of that was accomplished by entering the Quarry Men in a succession of “skiffle contests” that had become a seemingly indispensable feature of every dance hall, cabaret, and church social in Liverpool. While these shows fed the public’s insatiable appetite for skiffle, the word contest was merely code for “no pay.” Promoters had found a way, however disingenuously, of providing a rousing variety show without spending a shilling on talent. The bands played for bragging rights, or in the Quarry Men’s case, the opportunity to cut their teeth and satisfy a powerful craving for the spotlight.
Toward the beginning of May, the Liverpool Echo began announcing auditions for a talent contest run by Carroll Levis, a corpulent Canadian impresario who was making a name in Great Britain for holding amateur shows in local theaters throughout the country. Later on, he would parlay this into a national TV spectacle and his own cottage industry on the order of Star Search or Stars in Their Eyes, but in the gloom of postwar England the stage—along with the opportunity to see some homegrown talent discovered and (hopefully) ascend to the big time—proved a tremendous draw.
In Liverpool, especially, the heritage of theater remained strong, providing the city with its chief means of entertainment. Television was in its infancy; very few people in Britain owned a TV set, and those who did watched one with a screen the size of a teacup. “People actually preferred the theater,” says a Liverpudlian who remembers that period for its vibrancy of local stage shows and enthusiastic audiences. The grand Pavilion Theatre, for example, packed people into panoramas like “Bareway to the Stars,” in which famous strippers, prohibited from moving (lest they be arrested) by police eager to invoke Lord Chamberlain’s decency law, enacted a series of statuesque tableaux that changed in content only when the curtains were closed. There were lowbrow comedies, burlesque, any number of goofy Dracula spin-offs, topical revues. The audiences were ripe for theatrical entertainment and tapped right into Levis’s brand of open talent shows, with their endless heats and face-offs.
By Liverpool standards, the Levis program was an extravaganza. There were eight acts, featuring a solid hour of old-fashioned entertainment, including Levis himself wearing a tuxedo and dickey bow. The Quarry Men turned up early that night, dressed as uniformly as their wardrobes allowed, in white shirts and dark pants. The entire band was nervous, but they plowed enviably through the allotted three-minute set that restricted them to one song, a straightforward rendition of “Worried Man Blues,” to rousing applause. The last act to appear was another skiffle band, the Sunnyside Skiffle Group from North Wales, fronted by an arch four foot two comic named Nicky Cuff, who mugged shamelessly throughout the number. Rod Davis sensed right away there was trouble ahead. “They had a coach and a lot of supporters with them,” he says of the competition, “plus, they really performed. The band jumped all over the stage. At one point, the bass player collapsed and played lying on his back. They created some excitement, whereas we stood in one spot, expecting people to just enjoy the music.”
As it turned out, that was the least of their problems. It was determined by the promoter that there was an extra three-minute segment that needed filling at the end of the show; since the Sunnyside Skiffle Group was already onstage, they were invited to perform another number. “We felt that was a disadvantage right away,” Hanton recalls. “As soon as they started the second song, John began arguing [about it backstage] with Levis. ‘That’s not right. You’re giving them the upper hand.’ We were all mad as hell.” But it was too late. Levis offered a halfhearted apology but stood adamantly aside while the Welsh group put their luck to good use, turning up the heat.
When it was time to select the winner, the Quarry Men braced themselves for the audience’s reaction. Levis wheeled out the Clap-o-Meter, a device that supposedly read the noise level of the applause. Every act registered scores in the high seventies and low eighties, except two. Portentously, Levis walked center stage to the microphone and announced: “This is an unusual situation, ladies and gentlemen, but we’ve actually got a tie.” Both the Quarry Men and the Sunnyside Skiffle Group had scored an identical perfect ninety. “We’re going to bring these two groups onstage again, and we’d like you all to clap for either one or the other.” Each skiffle band posed proudly in the spotlight’s glare, while their supporters hollered and whistled in the seats. It was a thrilling moment all around, but when the last hand subsided, the Sunnyside Skiffle Group proved victorious by a hair. “We were robbed,” Hanton says, tapping into some residual anger, “and Carroll Levis knew it, too. While he was lining us up for the grand finale, he apologized, saying, ‘I might have been a bit unfair there, lads, but it’s too late now. Don’t despair—you were quite good. Just keep at it.’ ”
Typically, Rod Davis managed to extract a valuable service from the disappointment. He says, “We got a lesson in showmanship. We didn’t win because of the other group’s antics, and that was where the germ of performing came over [us].” For John, however, the letdown was crushing. He had hoped to capitalize on a win in the talent show, wielding it as a magnet to attract work. Come the end of June, he’d be finished with Quarry Bank, shorn of his security blanket, such as it were, and forced to consider a trade. It was a destiny he pushed further and further from his mind. “I was just drifting,” John acknowledged. “I wouldn’t study at school, and when I was put in for nine GCEs [General Certificates of Education], I was a hopeless failure.”
Despite the largely unsatisfying result of their talent competition, the Quarry Men pushed on. Nigel Walley, who had quit school at the age of fifteen to become an apprentice golf pro, came up with their “first real engagement” of note at the club where he worked. Lee Park had been founded by a collective of Liverpool’s Jewish families who, having been denied membership in almost every Merseyside club, desired a social sanctuary for their community. One afternoon during a round of golf with Dr. Joseph Sytner, a member whom Walley lionized as a “great tipper,” Nigel broached the subject of his alternate existence managing the Quarry Men. Sytner’s son, Alan, who “was crazy for jazz” and had run two jazz clubs—the 21 Club, in Toxteth, and the West Coast, on Dale Street—was launching yet another venture that had so far attracted considerable attention in Liverpool. Called the Cavern and situated accordingly belowground in an old produce warehouse, it was modeled after Le Caveau Français Jazz Club, a Parisian haunt Alan had visited on holiday, and had been financed by the £400 inheritance he’d received on his twenty-first birthday. Since its official launch in January, the club had showcased a stellar lineup of traditional jazz bands whose fans thronged the subterranean den nightly. Nigel didn’t care a whit for trad jazz, but he’d heard that Sytner filled intermissions with the Swinging Bluegenes, a “sophisticated skiffle” band that played traditional standards such as “Old Man Mose” and “Down by the Riverside” with a “jazzy rhythm section.” If it wasn’t too much to ask, Nigel proposed to his teemate, “Would your son give us a shot at [playing] the Cavern?”
Sytner, who knew Nigel well and liked the boy, said he would be happy to arrange something; however, first he wanted to hear the group for himself. “Can you bring them down to the golf club one night?” he asked. Nigel volunteered the Quarry Men’s services for the club’s upcoming social committee reception quicker than he could yell, “Fore!” Once again, no pay was involved, but Dr. Sytner said, “We’ll feed and water you. The rest is up to your group.” If everything came off as expected, they’d be assured of at least an audition at the exclusive Cavern.
The Quarry Men regarded the Lee Park “gig” as even more crucial than the Carroll Levis show. The audition aside, there was the matter of vindication, a chance to prove to themselves that they were worthy of commanding such a venerable audience. But the real plum was the billing: they were the evening’s solo attraction, which meant they’d need to put on a full-scale show, they’d have to entertain.
“John reacted as though we were playing the Palladium,” Shotton recalls. For him, a country club triggered images of poshly dressed socialites, standing in a haze of perfumed cigarette smoke while sipping cocktails from triangular-shaped flutes and basking in unforced elegance. He had an immediate attack of grandeur, suggesting to the others that they wear “real uniforms” out of respect for their position as headliners at such a ritzy affair. On its face it seemed absurd that a cash-poor skiffle band without much experience should worry about smartening up for a party of outcast Jews. A brief discussion ensued in which it was decided to dress respectfully but authentically: white shirts (out of respect) with black jeans (to maintain the edge). Everyone gave his consent, except for Rod Davis, whose parents found jeans repugnant and forbade him to wear them. The lads fretted over this dilemma for a moment, until finally even the upstanding Davis acknowledged the gig’s importance and arranged to buy a secondhand pair from Mike Rice at the usurious price of 37 pence.
The night of the performance, the Quarry Men felt in fine form. They had arrived a few minutes before seven o’clock, while the old guard club members were finishing dinner, and were impressed with the fastidious arrangements. Says Nigel Walley: “We played in the club’s downstairs lounge. They had moved all the chairs back to make it look like a music hall. A little stage had been set up, and to our surprise they’d provided a microphone, which was as scarce as money in those days. It gave John a real boost; he was chomping at the bit to get at it.”
Half an hour later, the audience started filing in—and not the twenty or so punters they had expected, but seventy-five to a hundred distinguished-looking people primed with enough liquor to give the room a gentle buzz of excitement. That seemed to raise the bar a few notches. Feeling flushed, the Quarry Men scrambled to tune their equipment. (Contrary to popular myth, John was completely capable of tuning his own guitar, Eric Griffiths insists.) A minor catastrophe was averted when Rod Davis bent for his banjo, splitting the zipper on his contraband jeans, but John cleverly instructed him to lengthen his strap so the instrument would hang low enough to conceal the tear.
As for the show itself, the Quarry Men had never been better. They careened through a dozen or so songs with relative spryness, feeling only “a slight tension [from the audience] toward the odd rock ’n roll song” mixed into the skiffle-heavy selection. But nothing could dampen John’s exuberance at the mike. When the spotlight fell on him, he responded like a moth to the flame. There was an unusually bluff spontaneity to his repartee, the velvet-smooth touch of a more seasoned entertainer. “John was very witty that night, throwing off one-liners and quips,” says Nigel Walley, who watched bemusedly from the sidelines while the crowd struggled to muzzle their laughter at each new inventive Lennon wisecrack. “In between numbers, he [came] out with the funniest lines. Someone in the crowd would say something and John would twist it into something else. They chuckled at everything he threw at them. It was fantastic.”
Despite a few off-key mishaps, the appearance was an unqualified, cracking success. “They were even nice enough to pass the hat around afterwards,” Walley recalls. “We wound up with fourteen or fifteen pounds, which was a lot more than we [would] ever [get] paid in the clubs.” To say nothing of its being their first paying gig!
The night also paid another dividend. As the audience dispersed, the band’s potential benefactor approached, shaking outstretched hands like a politician. They could tell Dr. Sytner’s reaction simply by the brilliant grin plastered on his face. He made no attempt to conceal his delight. The members, he told them, had roundly enjoyed the Quarry Men’s performance. In a reception area outside the lounge he reported to Nigel that he’d “thoroughly appreciated” the band’s attitude and wit as well. “That’s a real professional group you’ve got there,” he said, not mentioning a word about the Cavern or his son. Walley initially determined to bring it up but declined, thinking, “There was only so far that I could push the matter.”
In the end, there was no need. Alan Sytner called Walley a week after the Lee Park show and offered the Quarry Men the opportunity to make their debut appearance at “a big-time music club.” In actuality, the so-called gig was nothing more than a guest spot—they’d play what was known as the “skiffle interlude,” a few songs, at most, sandwiched between the evening’s two main jazz attractions—but it would be the first of many bookings that would transform the Cavern into an international mecca.
The Quarry Men managed to play only a few scattered dates before the end of the school term. No gig was too small to fill their impoverished dance card. They made appearances at the St. Barnabas Church Hall and at St. Peter’s Youth Club, which were both done gratis. They were also featured performers at a Quarry Bank school dance. John became progressively more confident at introducing numbers, making humorous patter, and singing, while his sidemen did a fair job of hanging together instrumentally. The trouble was, their wiring was so agonizingly basic: three chords strummed like a baker grating apples to songs that demanded little else. John continued to play skiffle with élan, but his thoughts turned more and more to rock ’n roll. Skiffle was outlaw ballads, populist struggle, protest songs, rural blues, and folklore of the American Plains. Rock ’n roll came from the streets and “the jungle”; it had a young, aggressive energy that seemed to provoke expression in a changing world.
Throughout the spring of 1957, John binged on the bumper crop of music slowly making its way to Britain. School lunch periods were devoted exclusively to searching out new sources, and come noon each day John would break away from Quarry Bank, taking either Pete Shotton or Eric Griffiths with him as he followed up each lead like a sleuth piecing together a case. They checked out Woolworth’s, W. H. Smith, several shops on the Allerton Road. His legwork eventually led to Michael Hill, a fellow classmate who, it was discovered, had “a great collection of American [rock ’n roll] records,” to say nothing of the early jump and blues artists, which were a revelation. Hill lived a few blocks from school, near Penny Lane, and since his mother worked, the boys could spend an unchaperoned hour or two sampling 78s in the empty house. By some miracle, Mike Hill owned the entire Elvis Presley oeuvre, as well as singles by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Johnny Otis, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino. “He also had records by the Dutch Swing Band,” says Pete Shotton, “which wasn’t our genre, but we… loved them.”
One afternoon as the boys picked through a lunch of chips and cigarettes, John was struck speechless when Hill dropped the needle on a copy of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” As recalled later by John: “[Mike] said he’s got this record… by somebody who was better than Elvis. When I heard it, it was so great I couldn’t speak.” John was beside himself, overwhelmed by Little Richard’s hoarse, howling vocal accompanied by a savage boogie-woogie bass line and barrelhouse piano that never faltered from the breakaway opening until the last decisive beat. “We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, not even in my mind. How could they be happening in my life, both of them? And then someone said, ‘It’s a nigger singing.’ I didn’t know Negroes sang.* So Elvis was white and Little Richard was black.”
John was already feeling a little shaky about his faith in the almighty Elvis. Eric, for one, noticed that although John treasured those early hits, “some things just didn’t click with him.” Recalling a day in 1957, on their way to afternoon classes, he says they took a hasty detour, busing into Liverpool instead to catch a matinee of Love Me Tender. “We sat in the cinema in Lime Street and killed ourselves laughing at [Elvis]. John thought he was ridiculous.” And yet, that fiasco, an artistic misfire, seemed to take none of his enjoyment away from the music. Almost immediately the Quarry Men began practicing “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” and “All Shook Up,” easy, poky versions, just shy a spark plug or two, that would satisfy the band’s itch for rock ’n roll without alienating the skiffle crowd. (They also took a stab at “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” the flip side of “Long Tall Sally,” but without much success.) “We started doing even more numbers by Elvis,” says Colin Hanton, who, as a drummer, welcomed every chance to pick up the languorous beat. “The audiences were beginning to ask for it; John was feeling it. We were ready to move on.”
But readiness was no substitute for talent.
The first real indication of trouble came during the band’s debut at the Cavern, sometime during the late spring of 1957. The Cavern was enemy territory, as traditional a jazz club as traditional jazz could muster: restricted, segregated, as exclusive as an autopsy, it was the sanctum sanctorum of Liverpool’s aficionados, with its own “would-be intellectual” clientele who were inflexible when it came to worshipping their righteous music. Inside, you were either for them or against them, and naysayers be damned. Only a year earlier, jazz pianist Steve Race, writing in his Melody Maker column, sounded the siren for a holy war against the heathen tongue. “Rock and roll is a monstrous threat, both to the moral acceptance and the artistic emancipation of jazz,” he warned his confreres. “Let us oppose it to the end.” The Cavern was the tabernacle for people who preached this absurdity like gospel.
The Quarry Men spent a fair amount of time preparing for the Cavern show, sorting through material, tightening arrangements, battling nerves as the date loomed near. Until the Quarry Men, John had little if any sense of the stability—and responsibility—that came with being in a band. Suddenly, he had the nucleus of a family, the subject for a meaningful (albeit unorthodox) education, the sneaking suspicion of pop stardom, and the attention he craved. “By this time, John thought he was Elvis Presley,” says Shotton. Whereas before, disagreements would come to a point of impasse, he now began exerting his authority, demanding artistic control.
To that end, John could be cruelly dismissive. He revealed flashes of pique at a rehearsal just prior to the Cavern date, when the band was practicing “Maggie May.” Rod Davis, who applied to banjo the same kind of aptitude he demonstrated for schoolwork, began crabbing his hand up the instrument neck, playing intricate chord inversions he had learned from a self-instruction book. John abruptly stopped the music. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said with a sneer. Davis tried explaining that it was the same chords played on different frets, for effect, but John cut him off. “You’ll play the same chords as me and Griff,” he insisted, glowering. A moment followed when neither boy said anything; it was reminiscent of a scene from an American western, when two gunslingers face off, waiting to see who intends to draw first. Davis isn’t sure whether the sound he was making cut through the other instruments too loudly or whether John, able to play only three chords, was jealous. But it is reasonable to assume that John didn’t like being showed up. Not this way, not in his band. Rod backed down, knowing better than to confront John. At school he had seen Lennon in action and considered him a bully, eager to prey on weaker boys. “He was a punch-up artist… a pretty good scrapper, whereas I was hopeless,” Davis admits.
The friction carried into the Cavern, where the two boys argued over the song list. At rehearsal, it was clear which way John intended to take the band. “Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis—all of those [artists’ songs] were inching into our repertoire,” Davis recalls. “He was turning us into a rock ’n roll band.” It wasn’t that Davis necessarily objected to that direction, but as a boy who played by the rules, he thought they’d be cutting their own throats at this juncture. “Because there was this major confrontation between rock ’n roll and jazz, you had to be careful what you played in front of whom. There were some venues where it didn’t matter, but if you [played rock ’n roll] in a jazz club like the Cavern, it was like going into Woolworth’s and shouting: ‘Marks and Spencer!’ It was a way of courting sudden death.”
The only thing the boys agreed on, entering the Cavern that first time, was what a creepy place they’d encountered. The entrance, a tiny doorway on an otherwise deserted street of warehouses, was right out of a Vincent Price film. There was a dismal solitude to the setting, enveloped, as it was, in an orb of cold, misty light thrown by a solitary bulb. Had the door creaked open to reveal a Transylvanian count, they might have run the other way. Most of the way down the steep, dark stairway there was no clue the passage actually led anywhere—no sound rose from the darkness, no flickering light at the end of the tunnel. The only sign of life was a stench that grew fouler and muskier as they progressed downward. Eventually the stairs bottomed out into a vestibule of sorts, which emptied into the club, itself a dank cellar in three sections separated by archways. The middle section, where the stage bisected a wall, contained roughly forty chairs from which people could watch the performance. The two outer sections were reserved for dancing and milling about. The room, although ill-conceived, insufferably hot, and claustrophobic, was nevertheless, in the opinion of the Quarry Men, well suited to its purpose. The acoustics were good, and the crowd could see the stage from practically anywhere in the cellar.
John disliked jazz almost as much as he hated jazz fans. He bristled at the clubgoers that drifted in, dressed alike in their duffel coats, jeans, and baggy sweaters. “From the beginning, we started arguing onstage,” recalls Davis. The band opened up with a trusty Donegan number, but then John cued the others for “Don’t Be Cruel.” Davis, who stood on his right, leaned over and whispered, “You can’t do that. They’ll eat you alive if you start playing rock ’n roll in the Cavern.” Determined, he completely ignored Davis and launched into the song. Says Rod, “You could tell the audience was uneasy about it, but that didn’t stop John. He was just going to continue and expected us to follow. I kept trying to persuade him, to no avail. He did several rock ’n roll numbers until it became clear that the powers that be were unhappy.” At some point, Alan Sytner sliced through the crowd and handed John a note on which was written: “Cut out the bloody rock ’n roll.” But anyone watching the slight, spectacled boy racing from song to song and drifting from one musical form to another knew he was not going to be deterred, whether by this crowd or by any other.
After the Cavern gig was over, the other members of the Quarry Men questioned whether the show had been worth the hassle. John felt they had turned a corner. The city may have been in the throes of a mad love affair with skiffle, but the natural evolution of teenagers augured a fickle heart whose beat was shifting to a more up-tempo rhythm, one in which rock ’n roll would prevail. Clearly, that seemed to be the sound calling to him.
Partly out of recognition of that change, Pete Shotton felt he was no longer equipped to remain with the band. He never liked participating to begin with, but the rigors of playing rock ’n roll demanded more than his thimbled fingers were able to contribute. The rhythm brought him into direct competition with Colin Hanton. At the Cavern, when John started to rock, Hanton occasionally hit a rim shot to sauce up the accompaniment. As Shotton recalls, “The sound of it got to me. I didn’t think it [was] right. So I told him, ‘Don’t hit it like that, it sounds awful.’ ” Instead of a compliant response, Hanton instructed him to “fuck off.” A few weeks later John and Pete crossed swords at a party, ostensibly over the washboard. They had played outdoors, at a birthday celebration thrown by Hanton’s aunt, who lived in Toxteth. Afterward, the best mates wandered inside her house with their instruments and chugged down a few pints each. They sat there convulsed with laughter while John tossed off jokes and wisecracks at other guests’ expense. Eventually, Shotton’s gaze drifted toward his lap, where the washboard lay balanced on his knees. He rocked it slightly, to draw his friend’s attention to it, and admitted what up till then had been tacitly unspoken between them: “I hate this, John. It’s not for me.” Shotton recalls being stunned by what happened next. “[John] picked up the washboard and smashed it over my head, just like that!” Pete says. “The tin part came out, and the frame was wrapped around my [shoulders].” Smirking slightly, John stared at the ridiculous scene he’d created and said, “Well, that solves that, then, doesn’t it?”
The real focus of their tension wasn’t the washboard or their friendship, however; it was the future of the Quarry Men. The band could not seem to generate momentum. Having outlived a brief honeymoon, during which John evaluated each band member and his contribution to the group, it became clear to him that, to continue at all, two elements were absolutely crucial: seriousness and ability. Shotton possessed neither quality. “It was perfectly obvious [to him] that I wasn’t musical,” Shotton says, “and John was taking the band seriously. [At last,] he really wanted to be a musician.”
A few obligations remained, for which Pete agreed to play, including one that his mother had arranged at the St. Peter’s garden fete, the most important event on Woolton’s social calendar. Otherwise, the band needed simple retooling. Perhaps replacing Pete wasn’t even necessary. Drums were all the percussion that was really needed, especially if the band moved further away from skiffle. But there were other cogs in the machine—namely, personality and ambition. It must have been unnervingly clear to John that he was never going anywhere with this gang.
The Quarry Men had run its course as far as a frolic was concerned. Len, Griff, Rod, even Colin—they were in it for a laugh. He couldn’t blame them for that, but somehow there was more at stake now for John Lennon. And here it was unraveling, slipping away. Sacking Pete, as it were, only precipitated the obvious destiny, though it is doubtful John could see it. With some distance he might have realized that it spelled the end of his band—and signaled the beginning of another.