Chalk and Cheese Chalk and CheeseThere was no eulogy for the Quarry Men—no tears shed, no postmortem. It was never actually acknowledged by anyone that they’d disbanded. But if they weren’t officially “done with,” the group was nonetheless in deep freeze. Without any gigs, there was nothing to keep them in action. Helplessly, they sat idle while the local rave scene grew up and around them, never reaching out an inviting hand.
Adrift, George, Paul, and John spent many nights at the Rialto, listening to and studying Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, whose transformation from catchy skiffle to a set heavily influenced by American rhythm and blues awakened the young bands in Liverpool. They also kept an eye trained on Alan Caldwell, who had emerged from his skiffly torpor with an intriguing persona to go with a flashy new sound. Jet (later, Rory) Storm and the Hurricanes were slick and soul-stirring, and they took advantage of the need for some pure entertainment in an idiom suffused with raw energy. Storm, a star athlete, was incredibly handsome and brimming with confidence—or at least appeared to be, with a hundred-watt smile he toggled on and off to the delight of his fans. Tall and reed-thin, with “peroxide-blond hair,” he went to dancing class to refine certain theatrics and wore either gold lamé or peacock blue suits onstage as a means of commanding the spotlight. He spent hours before a show choosing a wardrobe. And if clothes didn’t make the man, he simply removed them, once “stripping down to a tiny bikini string thing before prancing about to the music.” A friend says, “He would do anything to get attention on the stage.” Even a pet monkey was drafted into the act “because it had excellent pulling power.” Storm’s voice was flimsy at best, and Johnny Byrne, a natural lead guitarist—Ringo called him “Liverpool’s Jimi Hendrix”—was deaf in one ear and played incredibly loud. But when the lights hit them and the music kicked in, there was magic in their performance. Howie Casey, who played sax for a rival band, the Seniors, and found himself frequently paired on the same bill, marveled at the Hurricanes’ “big stage act.” Recalling it fondly, he says, “When the lights came up, all the guitarists had a foot up on their [cream-and-red Selmer] amps, their backs turned to the audience. And when they started to play, [Caldwell] would come swinging on and they’d turn around on cue. It was very sharp, very bold. No one else, in 1958, was doing anything remotely like that.” More than any movie or record, this band’s stage presence left an indelible mark on the Beatles.
Everywhere the former Quarry Men looked, the rock ’n roll bandwagon was rumbling ahead, picking up steam. Teenage venues opened as fast as promoters could find vacant buildings or church halls to rent. The Dominoes and the Hurricanes worked four or five times a week, and one only had to open a newspaper to glimpse lists of regular “big beat dances” featuring young bands like Ian and the Zodiacs, Dale Roberts and the Jaywalkers, the Swinging Bluegenes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Cass and the Cassanovas.
Quietly, George attempted to join Storm’s tony outfit, showing up at his West Oakhill Park house one afternoon in a bid to audition for the band. Vi Caldwell, a blunt, outspoken woman who steered her son’s career with fastidiousness, dismissed George as if he were a child. “I told him he was too young,” she reported to her son and Johnny Byrne, both of whom were having tea in the kitchen. But George’s appearance there confirmed something that up till then Byrne had only suspected. He turned to Storm and said, “It seems the Quarry Men are done with.”
By the end of 1958, George’s itch to play was so strong that he took up with three other friends—Ken Brown, Les Stewart, and a lad known only as Skinner—in a rather pedestrian unit called the Les Stewart Quartet. Mostly, they just rehearsed together in the Lowlands, a coffee bar in a residential section of town, but eventually some work dribbled their way. Limited to the outer fringe of the rock ’n roll scene, they concentrated on gigs held at “working-men’s clubs [which] never paid… more than ten bob” and the occasional wedding reception.
Harry and Louise continued to encourage George’s musical interests, although (like most parents) they had grown leery of John Lennon’s influence over their son. John had always been welcome at the Harrisons’ house; Louise, especially, treated him with warmth and jollity, playing the giddy hostess and feeding him endless helpings of beans and toast, a Scouse favorite that Mimi refused to make. But as the year wore on and his behavior grew more erratic—and more terrifying—even Louise was forced to reconsider her opinion.
“By December, he was completely out of control,” recalls Jonathan Hague, who continued to drink and carouse with John almost every night that fall. “We had learned to drink together, but somewhere along the way he left me in the dust.” Hague attributes John’s excess to rage, which crept over him unexpectedly, like the dense Liverpool fog. “He seemed to be consumed by anger at that stage. He was jealous of other students, resentful about his mother’s death, and frustrated—trapped—by his situation at school. He was clearly mixed up—just lost—with no one willing or able to help him.”
John always struck where he knew people would be most vulnerable, “mimicking their accents or a particular disfigurement,” according to Hague. There are countless stories about how John pulled up limping alongside a cripple or insisted on shaking hands with an armless veteran. “Most of his antics were harsh—but harmless,” says an art school classmate. But more than once, a sharp-eyed art student had to rescue John from an imminent beating, or buy a couple of pints for “an enraged neighbor” he’d insulted, as goodwill. Helen Anderson says that “he was embarrassingly rude to people, hurling insults at them, telling them to fuck off. It was terrible. Most of us eventually got fed up with him.”
Friends looked to Paul to control the damage, but it was beyond even his know-how. When John “went off like that,” Paul usually waited for the storm to pass or humored John to keep him from turning up the heat. And unbeknownst to Paul, some considered his presence in these situations more problem than solution. “It was obvious that John had big reservations about Paul, too,” says Hague, who absorbed his friend’s harangues during their drinking binges. “Even then, there was great jealousy there. He was all too aware of Paul’s talent and wanted to be as good and grand himself. After a while, you could see it, plain as day: the subtle body language or remarks that flew between them. He wasn’t about to let someone like Paul McCartney pull his strings.”
In the closing days of 1958, there seemed to be few options that could save John from himself. Julia was gone; Pete Shotton was preoccupied with police cadet training; Geoff Mohammed’s relationship with a cranky coed kept him on a tight leash; even Barbara Baker, his loyal moll, had thrown in the towel and taken up with another young man, to whom she would eventually get married. Everything brought the feeling of alienation into sharper focus. His friendships with Bill Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe provided a respite, although both students were committed to their art. Aside from Paul and George, there seemed to be no one to fill the encapsulating void. His entire support system was falling apart.
Then, a few days before the end of the term, Cynthia Powell walked into his life.
It had never occurred to Cynthia that the “scruffy, dangerous-looking, and totally disruptive” boy who “frightened the life out” of her at art college would end up her soul mate. John Lennon was a character out of her worst nightmares, a tatty ted, “outrageous… a rough sort” who flew so far below her social radar that his existence barely even registered.
They had been in class together for most of the year, but as the girl from the wrong side of the aisle, Cynthia Powell had escaped special notice. It wasn’t that she was maidenly or unglamorous. But in a school filled with artsy “individuals,” she toed the conventional line. Pale and painfully timid, to the point of walking half a step behind her best friend when they entered a room together, she melted into crowds like the scenery in an unfocused photograph. With her flat, Irish forehead, pleading eyes, and fine, honey-colored hair bobbed in a secretarial fashion, Cynthia saw her image as something so plain and common that it was “otherwise known as [a] mouse.” She was slim and delicately shaped with good legs and a smile that puckered slightly with suggestive intimacy. But her Gainsborough beauty was a gift she ignored.
Most of the male population there had her pegged as another well-mannered “good girl,” no less a posh good girl, from the suburbs—and rightfully so. In the evenings, when her father, Charles, arrived home from work, Cynthia would be dressed to please, with her corn-silk hair brushed extravagantly, to which she’d added a special touch like a bow or matching combs so he would “take notice,” which he invariably did. Cynthia revered Charles Powell, and in her rush to build herself in his image, she adopted his best qualities: tact, graciousness, modesty, and impeccable manners.
Nothing on file explains where her attraction to John came from. As a teenager, she had always developed strong crushes on boys about whom there were unknowns but no mysteries. Anyone whom Cynthia dated was basically a well-scrubbed Catholic boy focused on the middle-class dream, his conduct always respectful and proper. Her last boyfriend, a student from the art college named Rodney Begg, did nothing to shatter that mold.
It was almost by accident that Cynthia even came into contact with John. The thirty-six students in their class had been divided arbitrarily into three groups, each of which stayed together all term for the various courses. But one afternoon a week they all met for lettering, and John, wandering in late as always, wound up at a desk directly behind her.
Art never commanded the rigors of, say, math or science—but lettering did. “It was a skill that required patience and discipline,” said Cynthia, who, as an illustrator of some talent, excelled when it came to making precise measurements and drawing perfectly balanced shapes. “For John… [lettering] was impossible.” He had neither the ability nor the temperament to pull it off. In order to distract from his inadequacy, he resorted to an old dodge as the class cutup, “making dirty smudges across his paper” and ridiculing Cynthia’s “superior” finishing-school appearance. That kind of noisy attention should have been enough to drive her far off his path. But something lit a fire in her. This bad boy, whose shadowy air disrupted everything it came into contact with, had sparked a chemistry of unrest within her body that was outside the boundaries of respect.
One afternoon, when their tutor failed to show up on time, the class scrambled his Victorian oaktag letter cards to make an optometrist’s eye chart, which inspired mock-examinations that led to the unmasking of Cynthia’s and John’s chronic—and dreaded—nearsightedness. For two teenagers who never saw eye to eye, the insecurity they shared was deliciously ironic. This kicked up a “vague friendship between them” that culminated in her cutting John curious glances during class and his addressing her broadly, and quite affectionately, thereafter as “Miss Powell.”
John aroused in Cynthia a nervous corruptibility she had never acted on before. The most daring thing she had ever done was to harmlessly experiment with pale lipstick and black eyeliner, along with a splash of Hiltone hair dye intended to turn her “into [a] blond bombshell.” She tried to explain away the sudden butterflies in her stomach by blaming it on a curiosity that had gotten out of hand, a fascination with the unknown. Yet for all Cynthia’s weak excuses, she soon admitted being “completely out of control.”
Later that December, a few days before the end of the term, an event occurred that brought some harmony to her internal disorder. Cynthia and a group of fellow students decided to celebrate the upcoming holiday by going around the corner to Ye Cracke between classes. After a lunch of sandwiches and black velvets, everyone drifted back to school, where an impromptu party was already in progress. A record player had been set up in one of the rooms. Cynthia was already quite light-headed, and when John pushed his way through the tangle of couples and asked her to dance, she fell rapturously into his arms. Over the years, both John and Cynthia loved to tell the story of how he asked her out on a date that afternoon, only to be politely rebuffed. “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m engaged to a fellow in Hoylake,” Cynthia purportedly replied. To which John shot back: “I only asked you out. I didn’t ask you to marry me, did I?”
No matter how later accounts differed, at the time Cynthia apparently relented. She came away from that room “madly in love,” so much so, in fact, that when classes resumed that afternoon, the two of them stole off to Stuart Sutcliffe’s flat, where they immediately slept together. The man from Hoylake was quickly forgotten.
For the next few weeks, John and Cynthia were just about inseparable. “He had found someone who took the edge off his anger,” says Jonathan Hague. Helen Anderson, who had known Cynthia from the age of twelve, says, “Even as a child, she was easygoing and philosophical. It used to impress us how much she always reasoned things through. But when she took up with John, we were fairly flabbergasted. They were like chalk and cheese because Cyn was so serious and John acted such a buffoon. She didn’t have that streak of outrageousness in her.” Nor was she bohemian—or “bohernia,” as John used to say. Their attraction may have “shocked” other students in their circle, but it was mostly regarded with enthusiasm and relief. Ann Mason felt that Cynthia did the whole school a favor by dating John. “When she took a shine to him, it did his confidence no end of good. And that calmed him down, letting us live and learn in peace.” What Cynthia may have lacked in spirit, she made up for in her blind devotion. “John was absolutely the dominant figure in that relationship,” recalls Bill Harry. “He was like most Scouse men, who demanded a subservient mate. Cynthia was a doormat. But she was very influential in keeping him under control.”
“Immediately, he started a metamorphosis on her,” says Helen Anderson, who watched the makeover with fascination. All of John’s canvases, she says, were depictions of smoky nightclub scenes, with a ripe-figured Brigitte Bardot character planted prominently on a barstool. “She was his dream girl,” and that was how he molded Cynthia. She started getting blonder, her hair grew longer, and finally she put it up, like Brigitte Bardot. All of a sudden Cynthia became very glamorous—and sexy! Cynthia wasn’t totally comfortable with her new guise. A friend recalls how she would duck into “the ladies’ loo before lunch, get tarted up, then wait for somebody—anybody she knew—to follow into the canteen.” She “didn’t have a clue” about how to carry off the new image. But John wanted it that way, and she complied without argument.
As 1959 unfolded, an exhilarating burst of rock ’n roll releases made it impossible for John to ignore the stubborn, intoxicating pull of pop music. Hits of the day—now golden classics—surfaced faster than stores could stock them:* “La Bamba,” “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “C’mon Everybody,” “Sea of Love,” “There Goes My Baby,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Sleep Walk,” “Rockin’ Robin,” “Dream Lover,” “Lonely Teardrops,” “Sea Cruise,” “Little Star,” “It’s Only Make Believe,” “Back in the U.S.A.” (the flip side was “Memphis”), and an extraordinary Ray Charles record that would emerge in the early 1960s as a trusty Beatles showstopper, “What’d I Say.” Week after week the racks were filled with new offerings by Ricky Nelson, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Del Shannon, the Coasters, Connie Francis, Dee Clark, Lloyd Price, and Bobby Darin, to say nothing of another half a dozen hits courtesy of the irrepressible Elvis Presley.
And by mid-1959, England had its first true homegrown star in the genre. Cliff Richard, with his malt-shop features, perfect haircut, and gleaming smile, was Britain’s answer to the likes of Elvis and Holly. He had been discovered performing at pubs around Hertfordshire and signed to EMI Records, which in August 1958 released an innocuous and stiff little single called “Schoolboy Crush.” During a promotional television appearance Richard ditched his single in favor of its much hotter B-side, “Move It,” which featured some furious guitar playing. A week later the record was a runaway smash.
With his band, the Shadows, Richard cast a Presley-like shadow on the landscape of British rock ’n roll. British teenagers embraced him as an identifiable voice, if not a cultural icon—proof that the empire could strike back musically when and if it wished. But in Liverpool, especially, there was a backlash against Richard’s squeaky-clean appeal. Scousers considered him too much of a lightweight, his music too mainstream, too derivative. And yet, dazzled by his success, most Liverpool bands imitated Richard’s every move. They put on matching suits, practiced the rhythmic little dance steps he popularized, and cooked up an act that used guitars in its choreography, much the way the Shadows did.
From the start, John, Paul, and George were determined to distinguish themselves among the army of Shadows imitators who thronged the dance halls. They were turned off by Cliff’s whole image, the way he pandered to audiences with an airbrushed suggestiveness, defusing the power of rock ’n roll. And their fiery reaction to Richard’s sugarcoated pop and the lemming-like behavior of their fellow Liverpool musicians energized John, Paul, and George, reviving their desire to perform.
Liverpool’s coffee-bar culture had grown up around the university and the art college as early as 1957, but it wasn’t until 1959 that these places shifted into full swing. For the longest time, students frequented Streates, the Kardomah, or the Marlborough, the latter of which had special rooms set aside where they could drink on the sly and sing bawdy songs. But it was a coffee bar next door to the Marlborough, called the Jacaranda, that attracted John, Paul, and George.
The Jacaranda was the largest room of its kind, a Dickensian soot-blackened storefront set near the corner of Slater and Bold Streets, so close to the schools that one of the university clubs proposed making it an annex. Inside, the café was all studied unpretentiousness: a cluster of mismatched wooden tables surrounded by metal-legged chairs, bare brick walls painted a glossy white, and a shelf warped from the weight of the copper kettles displayed on it.
“It was like all the places we’d hung out in,” recalls Beryl Williams, who with her husband, Allan, had opened the Jacaranda coffee bar in the former premises of a watch-repair shop in September 1958. Like many of Liverpool’s young, working artsy set, the Williamses had spent the fifties in thrall of jazz—and bohemian culture. Hitchhiking across the Continent, they’d “lived in the cafés of France and Holland,” until at the age of twenty-six, they opted to join the wave of offbeat hipsters determined to bring the counterculture to Liverpool.
Initially, the Jacaranda drew Liverpool university students, but eventually Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon gravitated there to discuss their work and dreams. The two would sit for hours in one of the corner booths near the window, talking earnestly about art and philosophy, while a mini–soap opera unfolded around them. It wasn’t long before John brought Paul and George with him to check out the music scene downstairs. The Jac’s tiny cellar had been converted from coal storage into a crude sort of cabaret, with barely enough space for a small group to perform in a corner. To create the right atmosphere, Allan Williams had booked a ragtag West Indian outfit—called, rather optimistically, the Royal Caribbean Steel Band—he’d first heard “in a Greek joint” near the art college. Almost immediately they attracted a devoted following. Jac regulars loved the metallic warble of “the big tubs” and the catchy calypsos that were de rigueur, but their awe was reserved for the band’s hugely dynamic leader, a spindly, gap-toothed Trinidadian named Harold Phillips, who knew how to work a crowd.
Over the next decade, Phillips became an almost legendary figure on the streets of Liverpool. Known to everyone as Lord Woodbine, or Woody, after the cheap cigarette always pasted to his lower lip, he was a man of immense charisma, with a rich, dulcet singing voice and a talent for wielding maracas like signal flags. He worked at the American air base in nearby Burtonwood but also ran a strip club and a number of illegal honky-tonks called shabeens, the most notable of which was the Berkeley, where John Lennon occasionally slept on a cot.
Allan Williams had passed the word that local groups were welcome to play at the Jacaranda on the steel band’s night off. Aside from extremely informal shindigs at the art college, John, Paul, and George had never performed as a trio, and it was unlikely they could stage a show on such little practice. Besides, even with Cynthia, John was still too troubled to give the band more time. There were days when he would stay in bed or sit forlornly at a table in one of the coffee bars, tortured by “feelings of remorse.”
The inertia caught up with John in June, as another college term drew to a close. Second-year students were required to take the intermediates, a series of exams that gauged individual progress, assessed skills, and determined whether they’d graduate to another two-year program, leading to a National Diploma in Design. Everyone was required to “submit for his certificate,” which meant you wrestled a folder of your work together, then sent it to a review board at the Ministry of Education for evaluation. Despite benefiting from several drawings Ann Mason offered to him, John still didn’t have enough to make a folder. According to Rod Murray, “everybody chipped bits of paintings and drawings in, and they made up a folder for him.”
Things only got worse when news came that he failed the lettering portion of his intermediates and would have to “resit” the course again. Naturally: the one subject he absolutely detested. It seemed like more punishment. John was clearly overwhelmed by a strong sense of failure, and his anger turned to despair. But just when it seemed that he couldn’t find any outlet for his anxieties, one found him.