A Good Little Sideshow A Good Little SideshowFor almost a year after George Harrison joined the Quarry Men, living rooms and backyards were, in general, the only venues where the band played gigs. Though local dance halls and “jive hives” actively booked acts to fill the huge demand for live music, they showed little, if any, interest in hiring the boys.
The neglect stemmed from a conventional reflex that went beyond mere talent itself. Despite the shift in influence from skiffle to rock ’n roll, Liverpool still served the forces of vaudeville, and for old-school promoters who governed the scene, its proprieties could not be shouldered aside. Never mind the crazy, foolish-sounding music—that they could abide. But disrespect for the past—never. They expected the type of slick, showbiz professionalism that had graced stage shows for sixty years, and anything less, any loss of respect, would not be tolerated whatsoever. Of course, this thinking ran contrary to the whole aesthetic of rock ’n roll. The beauty of the music was that it so rudely flouted tradition. Perhaps rock critic Lester Bangs put it best when he suggested that rock was “nothing but a Wham-O toy to bash around as you please in the nursery.” It sent up the whole feeble showbiz establishment in a way that was guaranteed to offend the old-timers who worshipped it. In Liverpool, the network of promoters—Brian Kelly, Charlie McBain, Vic Anton, Bill Marsden, Ralph Webster, and Doug Martin, among others—accepted the shift away from more traditional music, but only on their terms, which meant that the beat groups they hired maintained a certain stodgy decorum. Most wore matching suits, played a polished set of songs mixed with corny patter, and behaved themselves like perfect gentlemen.
All of which eluded the Quarry Men.
“John refused to behave like a trained monkey,” says Nigel Walley. “He’d take a gig seriously, show up on time, and [be] ready to play, but as for someone’s idea of proper behavior, he was having none of it.” John wouldn’t kowtow to promoters who insisted that the band present a hokey stage show. Requests to “tone down the volume” were routinely ignored.
And there were too many other acts who were willing to play by the rules. The same names kept cropping up wherever Nigel tried to land a gig. The Swinging Bluegenes blended jazz and traditional blues into a silky smooth, if innocuous, confection that went down with relative ease. The same with the Mars Bars, fronted by a Scouse sprite named Gerry Marsden, whose twinkly, eager-to-please stage persona reminded many spectators of a docile marionette and whose show packed all the punch of a pub sing-along. Slightly harder-edged, but no less parochial, were the James Boys, who later, as Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, became the resident, or house, band at St. Luke’s Hall, in the suburb of Crosby. Eddie Miles, arguably the best guitarist in Liverpool, launched Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares (with his next-door neighbor, a teenager named Richard Starkey) to showcase a “down-home” style session. Cass and the Cassanovas appeared regularly in a “student joint” called the Corinthian, where Brian Casser, “an assertive, all-around showman” with a sweet, toothy image, played the type of tame set that required his drummer to use brushes. And Al Caldwell’s Raging Texans, unconvincing as teenage rebels, mined the same rank showmanship that established them a year later as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. These bands, which became the vanguard of the Merseybeat phenomenon, along with the Two Jays, the Hi Tones, and half a dozen other beat groups, developed faster, rocked respectfully, and toed the line.
Frustrated by the band’s slow progress, John and Paul concentrated on practicing together every spare moment they got—and lit upon a momentous discovery. Paul, as it happened, mentioned casually that he’d written several songs, and he played John an early effort called “I Lost My Little Girl.” The song is an achingly simplistic romantic ballad from the perspective of an uninitiated fourteen-year-old; nevertheless, John was, in Pete Shotton’s estimation, “floored.”* It is difficult to imagine that writing songs had never occurred to John, although he may have assumed that the effort was beyond him; or it is possible he just never gave it a whirl. There was little precedent for it among British teenagers. At any rate, Paul’s disclosure set the current flowing and is arguably a pivotal event in modern musical history.
A few years later, people who toured with the Beatles related countless stories about watching John and Paul bang out songs together on a crowded bus or a plane or a van or in the throes of backstage chaos—they could write anywhere and were apparently unself-conscious about it—but by that time the formula was ingrained; they were cranking them out like piecework.
In the spring of 1958, John and Paul exorcised the music that was heard—and shared—in their heads. It was a burst of pure, unconscious energy, and despite all later efforts to perpetuate it, the urgency was no longer there. As John so archly put it: “You can’t be that hungry twice.” They had all the tools right at hand: innocence, enthusiasm, desire, opportunity. Between them there was no shortage of imagination or energy. If they lacked anything, it was technique, the musical skills necessary to bring the kind of intricate, unconventional, even intellectual touches to their songs that marked their later work. Their talent was so natural, so unforced and kinetic, that it developed like infant speech. Perhaps they didn’t understand it themselves.
That spring John and Paul gorged themselves on a bumper crop of fresh material, experimenting with lyrical harmonies and a panoply of vocal styles served by their natural abilities. Most of the treatments they tackled were copied faithfully from American records, down to the last marginal lick. Later John urged fans away from such crutches, admonishing them, “Don’t copy the swimming teacher, learn how to swim,” but for the time being, imitation prevailed as they jumped from one influence to another, casting around for an identity.
Initially there was an almost obsessive preoccupation with the Everly Brothers, whom the boys adopted as their “idols.” They careened from one Everly hit to the next—“Cathy’s Clown,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “So How Come (No One Loves Me)”—including, as Paul noted, “even some of the B sides like ‘So Sad (to Watch Good Love Go Bad).’ ” Their parts were custom-made for impersonation. “I’d be Phil and John would be Don,” he explained, recalling the flights of fantasy in which they performed the songs with exaggerated emotion, trying their best to imitate the brothers’ downy harmonies.
Eventually they gravitated to Buddy Holly, whose cadences bore a twangy, albeit double-tracked, similarity. After being sacked from the Quarry Men, Griff had enlisted in the merchant marine, shipping out immediately to ports in South America and Canada. “That’s where I picked up Buddy Holly,” Griffiths says. “I brought his records back to Liverpool [along with Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”], and John and Paul would either buy them off me, or we’d swap.” The attraction wasn’t hard to fathom. Buddy Holly had everything they wanted, everything they’d been struggling to create musically: melodic songs; a crisp, clean sound; impeccable rhythm; unforgettable riffs; and monster appeal. His entire image was suffused with the dreamy romanticism of a small-town success story. Only twenty-two, he conveyed an Everyman presence, with his birdlike face, unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses, and a gawkiness at odds with rock ’n roll stardom. When he sang, his clear, slightly nasal alto, with a hint of the Deep South, carried a message of determination. One song, in particular—“Listen to Me”—presented an enormous challenge. “We sat around for an entire afternoon trying to decipher the lyric,” recalls Arthur Kelly. “No one could figure out the line ‘I will love you tenderly,’ because [Holly] phrased it so awkwardly. It drove John nuts: ‘What is it? What is it?’ They went through every possible rhyme, matching it to the previous line, before hitting on the proper word.” Eventually, after putting it all together, they worked up a neat little arrangement to go with the rest of Holly’s vibrant repertoire.
More germane to their discovery of Buddy Holly was that he wrote his own songs. “People these days take it for granted that you do,” Paul recalled, “but nobody used to then.” It reinforced the capricious experiment that they’d heretofore only tiptoed around with trepidation. Buddy Holly gave them sanction—and courage. He was the whole rock ’n roll package. For John and Paul, this hit like an explosion. “John and I started to write because of Buddy Holly,” said Paul.
By March 1958, songs were pouring out at an extraordinary rate. The McCartney parlor, conveniently deserted during weekdays, played host to a revolving cast of layabouts sagging off school, its frost-rimed windows pooled with condensation from the rising body heat, the wallpapered room, which was too small for the turnout, engulfed in a purple cloud of cigarette smoke. Guitars rested against the coffee table, sandwich wrappers and cups lay balled up on its surface, creating an impression that the place had been vandalized. Framed within this tableau were John and Paul, their hunched figures posed in profile on the couch—“playing into each other’s noses,” as John often described it—sifting through papers and notebooks fanned out on the seat cushion between them. “We kept the record player going a lot of the time, playing the latest American hits.” They would begin by scrawling, “A Lennon-McCartney Original,” at the top of a blank, blue-lined page, then jotting down “anything [they] came up with”—words, images, or fragments of lyrics that corresponded to one of the protean melodies that bounced back and forth like a beach ball until it was resolved. Gradually, a verse would take shape, then another; verses would get linked to a refrain, with rejected phrases blacked out or reworked, and substitutes annotated in the margins to fit a particular meter. It was an indefinite, unpredictable process; there was nothing sophisticated about it—no method to speak of, aside from studying other songs—just a general notion of where something was headed. A large measure of luck factored into it. And even then they regarded the outcome perfunctorily, like driftwood that had washed up onshore. As John recalled, “We were just writing songs a la [the] Everly Brothers, a la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought to them than that—to create a sound.” Constructing a great hook was their chief goal, something sly and memorable. “Lyrics didn’t really count as long as we had some vague theme: ‘She loves you, he loves her, and they love each other.’ ”
From the beginning, John tapped right into the approach that Paul first experimented with. Clearly, it presented no struggle for him. He had an innate feel for songwriting, a talent for turning a phrase inside out until it squealed. “It was great,” Paul recalled, “because instead of looking into my own mind for a song, I could see John playing—as if he was holding a mirror to what I was doing.”
But like all scientific processes, the payoffs were inconsistent. Their first collaborative efforts—“Too Bad About Sorrows” and “Just Fun”—lacked intensity. Burdened by lazy moon/June rhymes, there wasn’t enough to rescue either song. “In Spite of All the Danger,” a sloppy doo-wop treatment that stands as the first original tune they recorded (although it wasn’t released until 1996), and “Like Dreamers Do,” another misfire that eventually earned a cover,* were shelved for lack of enthusiasm. The first songs that showed some promise were “One After 909” and “I Call Your Name,” the latter of which they wrote in April while camped out in John’s bedroom.
“One After 909” is as simple and straightforward as any song they ever wrote, and surprisingly durable for its economy. Built on a standard three-chord progression, it owes plenty to the early Chuck Berry hits, especially “Maybelline,” with a chunky R&B vamp, thumping bass, and country-type licks woven into the breaks. The lyric bristles with an emotional uneasiness, full of the unfocused, adolescent frustrations a guy experiences when attempting to hook up with his girl. But unlike the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl scenario, this one is ill fated from the start. He is certain what train she is traveling on—she’s told him “the one after 909”—but to no avail. When he turns up at the station to meet her, even the location is wrong. The song had all the potential for whiny self-pity, but instead of its being cast as a lovesick plaint, an unexpected bitterness churns below the surface—“Move over once, move over twice / C’mon, baby, don’t be cold as ice”—an early glimpse into John and Paul’s narrative finesse.
“I Call Your Name” proved every bit as effective, but with more of the upheaval and restlessness that appear in later songs. Lyrically, the song is a trifle, no more than a verse with a whiff of a chorus, but it packs plenty of heat. Unlike in “909,” the subject suffers great emotional fallout from a broken relationship, particularly at night, when, at his most vulnerable, he calls his girlfriend’s name—and she’s not there. There’s no way he can sleep; haunted by the breakup, he feels he can’t “go on.” Images resonate with despair. “Don’t you know I can’t take it” reconciles into “I’m not gonna may-yay-yake it, I’m not that kind of man.” The rhymes may scan in a rather mundane way, but the execution is extraordinary.
By the end of the school year, a respectable number of original songs had been copied into that beat-up notebook. In addition to the early Lennon-McCartney efforts, bits and pieces existed of “I’ll Follow the Sun” (featured on the Beatles for Sale album [U.S. title: Beatles ’65]), “Years Roll Along,” and “Love Me Do,” whose structure had been begun months earlier by Paul and awaited John’s tinkering. There were between fifteen and twenty, in all, “most of them written under two or three hours,” Paul explains, divulging a process that served the boys through nearly all their collaborations. “It was the amount of time we allotted ourselves and, in fact, it hardly ever took much longer than that.” Whenever they hit a wall—blanking on a phrase, a transition, or that elusive chord change—instead of resisting or addressing it later, they pushed through until the problem was solved, or at least they could see some daylight through the snarl. Nearly always they brought a song to the point where it required some feedback. That was the main reason friends were invited to sit in on their writing sessions. “It was always good practice playing [a new song] for people,” Paul recalls. “We’d kind of try it out on them.”
Barbara Baker, George Harrison, Nigel Walley, and several of John’s art school mates formed the audience for regular Lennon-McCartney showcases. Slouched on the furniture at Forthlin Road while John and Paul wrote, they’d look up from whatever they were doing and listen to the latest work in progress. “We’d do some good rhythm on the guitars, and we probably harmonized a little together,” Paul recalled in a memoir. “For people who’d never seen anyone who could write songs before, we were probably quite a good little sideshow.”
With John and Paul spurred on by such favorable reaction, nothing could keep them from pursuing their craft. School proved a nagging obstacle, the occasional stolen afternoons unsatisfying, hardly time enough to get something going before Jim arrived home from work. Weekends were reserved primarily for the band. It wasn’t so much that they needed time to write as much as it was each other’s company. “Something special was growing between them,” says Colin Hanton, “something that went past friendship as we knew it. It was as if they drew power from each other.”
Or simply comfort. Their two fates seemed strangely connected. They were the perfect foils for each other’s disaffections. For Paul, who had lost his mother to an illness, and for John, whose home life was fraught with emotional confusion, their relationship created an alternate reality, free of such tensions. Certainly there was a competitive element between them, but it demanded so little in the way of compromise. And the compromise, they found, produced an aggressive inventiveness. If nothing else, that spring they established a mutual language for talking about music and dreaming about the future, a language that gave them common currency. Mostly, however, they let their guitars do the talking. No matter how anyone interpreted it, it was the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney best communicated.
To augment their time together, Paul and George began spending lunch hours with John next door, in the art college canteen. This was more problematic than it sounds. For one thing, institute students were forbidden to stray from the grounds during school hours (a minor glitch, however, to boys for whom hooky was a routine choice). For two years they’d been “sneaking out” to a fish and chips shop on Huskisson Street without incident, so an art school detour seemed of little consequence. Rather, an image problem prevailed. The last thing Paul and George wanted was to look like kids in their mentor’s eyes. They craved John’s camaraderie and, ultimately, his respect. And yet, walking into that building across the courtyard was a humbling experience, dressed conspicuously as they were in precious grammar-school uniforms, especially in contrast to John’s black shirt and jeans. Ties got yanked off; badges were unpinned from blazers. However, there was no practical way to disguise their clothes other than keeping their macs buttoned to the neck, which they did in a desperate effort at first, until realizing it only served to draw more attention to them. And there was nothing they could do to hide their adolescence. Most of the art students had already turned eighteen, and to them, Paul and George appeared like “lovely little boys” visiting an elder brother.
To his credit, John wasn’t deceived by appearances. Each day, he met his friends by the entrance, then accompanied them down a wide flight of cast-iron stairs to the crowded canteen, where they lounged across a tiny stage reserved exclusively for the annual college dress designers’ show and ate the students’ staple of baked beans on toast, with tea. The canteen was noisy, but its appeal was “you could smoke there,” says a classmate who occasionally joined the boys for lunch. As soon as everyone got settled, John would “whip out a pack of fags” and entertain Paul and George with “stories about the art school birds he was shagging,” spinning tales with about as much veracity as a fortune-teller. Eventually their attention was drawn toward “an older, ethereal, very talented painter” named Johnnie Crosby, who fashioned her appearance after Brigitte Bardot, with slinky, formfitting sweaters and “wonderful honey-blond hair piled up into a beehive,” and sat alone each lunch hour at the opposite side of the stage, her long legs crossed provocatively in deference to the boys who were “swanning about and drooling over her.”
“Hey, John? Have you had her yet?” they’d chime in a chorus of breathless anticipation. To which John would glumly snap, “No!” before amending it to “Not yet.”
John had no way of knowing the effect that his boasts of casual sex had on other classmates. All around him, he saw fellow students living out their bohemian fantasies. He just assumed that included sexual fulfillment. And yet, for all the free-spiritedness, the art college crowd remained frightfully inexperienced. “A student’s having sex wasn’t socially acceptable,” says Ann Mason, who fought off escalating advances from Geoff Mohammed with game defiance. “Contraception was not easy to come by; you couldn’t get it without some dispensation from the vicar that said you were getting married within the next three weeks, and even then you needed credentials proving you were worthy of family planning. Actually, I didn’t know anyone at school who was having casual sex aside from the teachers—and John Lennon.”
In fact, Barb Baker had resisted his constant groping for nearly a year. She was “too afraid of getting pregnant” to surrender to their lust and said that “as far as we got were kisses and cuddles.” Still, they teased each other with maddening recklessness, necking and petting, until sleeping together seemed like the only recourse. Pleadingly, calculatingly, John swore his undying love, “proposing to [Barb] nearly every night.” Things got so intense between them that “getting pregnant… no longer mattered,” she said, and so in the spring of 1958 they “became each other’s first [sexual] experience.”*
Barb and John’s romantic exploits, combined with the continuing creative outpouring, converted those lunch hours into lively, much-anticipated affairs. In the canteen, Paul and George huddled with John, their heads tepeed together, earnestly talking music and sex while art students filed past them. Consistent with George’s laissez-faire attitude toward school, it was left to Paul to keep an eye on the clock, lest they miss the one o’clock class bell. Most days they made it back to the institute with seconds to spare. On other occasions, however, when intrepid conversation ruled, they forswore afternoon classes with a nonchalance that bordered on audacity.
Toward the end of the term, Paul and George began carrying their guitars with them. The institute had a long-standing practice of allowing students to occupy their own time in the classroom while teachers marked final papers and exams. Boys clustered together at desks and worked jointly on models, some drew, others read. Stirred by the rare loosening of rules, the boys felt an irrepressible itch to see how far things could be stretched. Having pushed the envelope so daringly and for so long, Paul and George rose fervently to the challenge.
Late one morning in May, students heard “the noise of an electric guitar… come twanging out of the music room.” This was an extraordinary occurrence, inasmuch as music at the institute was largely theoretical, limited to the practice of notation and its analysis. Any hands-on experience consisted of mindless exercises, such as triangles being distributed so that students could tap out tinkly rhythms, which snuffed out any spark of enthusiasm. What’s more, the music teacher would never have permitted such a display, being “such a right swine,” as he was, a man who was known “to smack boys he accused of looking at him in an insolent manner.”
And yet, the renegade sound persisted, loud and clear.
Colin Manley and Don Andrew remember being in a classroom on the first floor when the music began. Both energetic guitarists who played skiffle at the Cavern as the Remo Four, they bolted from their seats in an attempt to track the big-game sound. “It was fantastic,” Manley recalls wistfully, “just wave after wave of a bluesy, instrumental thing that had us rushing up and down stairs, trying to locate its source.” When they hit the third floor, the mystery was partially solved. Students were jammed into the music room, spilling out into the crowded hall. “We couldn’t even get near the door,” Andrew says, so reluctantly he and Manley hiked up on tiptoe, peering into the room.
They were startled to see George Harrison, a boy they regarded as “just filling in time at the school,” hugging the spotlight. He was perched on a stool in front of the blackboard, with the new Hofner guitar his mother had bought at his insistence, running down a riff with an incisive, authoritative touch. George finished playing “Raunchy,” which was becoming his signature number, then joined Paul in a medley of rock ’n roll songs. “They played some Little Richard, a Carl Perkins song, and maybe a couple of Chuck Berry [numbers],” Andrew recalls. Eventually a prefect turned up to move the crowd along. But the damage had been done. Rock ’n roll had invaded the institute’s hallowed halls for the first time in anyone’s memory.
“They began playing in the art school canteen,” Bill Harry remembers, “working out new songs or playing requests.” Usually a small crowd would gather to listen. Though not yet polished performers, there was an appealing quality about them, especially their voices. Helen Anderson, in particular, was touched by their flair. “With no backing to speak of, they were wonderful,” she says. “They harmonized just beautifully together.”
But occasionally John needed breathing room. Paul and George were great sidekicks, but in his eyes they remained kids, grammar-school boys. When the weather turned warm, John organized outings to New Brighton beach with classmates his own age. Helen Anderson says, “We’d share sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade. None of us had bathing suits; we just pulled our sweaters down off our shoulders and relaxed.” As always, John provided the entertainment. He’d play the guitar, often accompanied by Stuart Sutcliffe, who was learning some rock ’n roll. “If things were miserable at school,” Anderson says, “I’d prod him to be funny—‘Oh come on, John, give us a bit of a laugh’—at which point he’d invent lyrics to popular songs and start buffooning.”
“I like New York and Jews, how about you?” he’d sing, affecting a Jolsonesque voice. “Holding rabbis in the movie show, when all the lights are low…”
The other students “laughed their socks off” at these “very twisted” parodies. It was a relief for most of them, considering the strained relationship that existed at college. Dedicated artists, utterly committed to their schoolwork, they liked John but resented his nonstop clowning, the senseless disruptions during class. “He made quite a few tutors look foolish,” says Ann Mason.
John would have gotten the boot long before were it not for Arthur Ballard. Like John, he was a terribly tormented man. “Most people had a perilous relationship with him: the closer you got, the more difficult it was,” says Helen Anderson, one of his star pupils that year. Much of that could be attributed to alcohol. His favorite watering hole was Ye Cracke, a tumbledown little public house with small drinking rooms stained brown from nicotine, around the corner from the college on Rice Street. Ballard held court there in a cubbyhole called the War Office, below a panorama of The Death of Nelson in which Hardy is depicted holding Nelson in his arms, oblivious to hundreds of anguished onlookers with their heads turned away—and which John Lennon retitled Who Farted? It was there that Ballard entertained his disciples, a small but acutely serious group of students whose perspective demanded mental exercise in addition to art. In Ballard’s eyes, “John had an awful lot of intensity” but was “totally overshadowed by Sutcliffe… and Bill Harry,” both of whom were “extremely well educated” and “very eager for information.” Then, near the end of the term, an event occurred that altered their relationship. As Ballard recalled it: “I found a sketchbook in the studio. I looked through it, and it was extremely amusing—[filled with] sketches, little drawings of other students. I found it quite satirical [and asked], ‘Who did this?’ [The students] were loath to tell me. Eventually they said, ‘It’s John Lennon.’ God, I was absolutely amazed! It showed so much talent.”
Overwhelmed by the discovery, Ballard “recommended [to the college administration] that John do graphic art so that he could get illustration instruction.” This was an extraordinary act of charity, considering that so far John had put no effort into his work. But Roy Sharpe, the “very conservative” director of the graphic art division, flatly turned down the request, a denial that was echoed by the head of the illustration department. Neither tutor wished to take on such a liability, dismissing John as a “totally disruptive” influence.
This only confirmed John’s worst fears about art college. After eight uninspiring months at the school, he saw it for what it was: a treadmill, a dead end. From the outset, he’d always suspected as much. His well-regarded classmates played by the rules; they were lackeys to the system and they’d leave school with no more insight than it permitted them to have. They’d be like sheep, ordinary and unoriginal, turned out of a mold. To John, that was no more interesting than “wallpaper.” Besides, few students had the talent to make their mark; they’d inevitably wind up teaching, which was a death sentence. “I was different,” he protested much later. “But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fuckin’ dentist or a teacher.”
“They” were the tutors, the source of his greatest frustration. It was “they,” after all, who stifled his creativity, “they” who wanted to put him in a box. “All they had was information that I didn’t need,” he complained, looking back on his art college nemeses. For the first—and surely not the last—time in his life, John sensed a conspiracy to handcuff and muzzle him.
It was more productive for him to reject the whole business. John may have suspected as early as the summer that his writing with Paul was the turning point. It certainly provided enough evidence of his uniqueness; it gave his special gift some place to flourish. By the end of June, John and Paul decided to put their talent to the test.
The Quarry Men were going to make a record.