Moondogs and Englishmen Moondogs and EnglishmenOver the years, John and Cynthia told many stories about George Harrison, the flap-eared little “whacker” with the slow hand and fast mouth. To George, they seemed the perfect pair, a symbol of independence. During summer vacation, he would determine their whereabouts and lock in on them like anti-aircraft artillery. “Cyn and I would be going to a coffee shop or a movie,” John told an interviewer, “and George would follow us down the street two hundred yards behind.” At first, they pretended not to see him. Cynthia, who was circumspect and too sweet-tempered to execute a “push-off,” would mumble a tremulous appeal to John on the fifteen-year-old’s behalf. “[George] would hurriedly catch up to us,” she recalled, “and [ask], ‘Where are you two off to? Can I come?’ ” More often than not, the lovebirds had plans for a movie that included some steamy necking in the dark theater—now rudely preempted. “So we would spend the lost afternoon as a jolly threesome, wondering what on earth we were going to do with ourselves.”
What on earth, indeed. At the time, it never occurred to them that George would soon jump-start the band’s stalled career.
It is doubtful that George even told John he was playing with anyone else. Besides, the Les Stewart Quartet was nothing to brag about. As musicians, they “didn’t hold a candle to John and Paul.” The upside, however, was their access to a generous rehearsal space at the Lowlands, along with an aura that netted George his first steady girlfriend, Ruth Morrison.
Unlikely as it seems, it was Ruth Morrison who brought the keys to the kingdom. One evening during a rather dispiriting coffee break at the Lowlands, she disclosed that a new coffee bar was opening farther down and across the street, in Hayman’s Green, which promised to make a considerable splash. It was located in the basement of a cavernous private home that could hold more than three hundred kids, and from what Ruth had heard, there was going to be live music. Bands knew from experience that new coffee-bar owners usually gave residencies to the first group that walked in the door—self-promotion, not quality, being the foremost criterion. Without waiting for more details, the Les Stewart outfit dispatched their most presentable representative, a guitarist named Ken Brown, to make his best pitch.
The house at 8 Hayman’s Green was a mini-mansion, a handsome gray Victorian structure of fifteen rooms set back from the road in a grove of tall trees. Ken was more than familiar with “the Best place,” as it was known, inasmuch as the owners’ son Pete was in his class at Collegiate Grammar School. It had been Pete who first proposed the idea of a club in the family’s unfinished cellar and instantly won the approval of his mother, Mona, a gregarious Indian-born diva for whom drama of this type was an essential fuel. And the club would provide a suitable distraction to her faltering marriage to Johnny Best, a flamboyant Liverpool fight promoter sidelined with a heart condition.
“I went round to see her,” Brown recalled, “and we helped her get the coffee bar ready, installing lighting, covering the walls with hardboard to prevent condensation, painting the place orange and black. In return Mrs. Best promised that we could play [there] when it finally opened.”
In the weeks before the club opened, a steady buzz built unlike anything the West Derby Village neighborhood had ever experienced. Kids came to gape at all the work being done: lights were put in, walls were lined with timber paneling, a dark alcove was converted into a snack bar. Finally, membership cards were printed, revealing the club’s alluring name: the Casbah.
The club was set to open on a Saturday night: August 29, 1959. For the Les Stewart Quartet the date was a milestone in their brief, relatively obscure existence. More than three hundred teenagers had already purchased membership cards in anticipation of the event, and the attention would catapult them into the limelight. But on the verge of celebrity, Les Stewart misinterpreted Ken Brown’s hands-on role at the Casbah as a power play. The insult, as Stewart perceived it, ignited an argument between the two boys just a week or so before their debut, culminating in Stewart’s refusing to play. The band folded prematurely, while George joined Ken Brown to give Mona Best the bad news.
On their way over to the club, Brown asked George if there was any way they could salvage the residency. “He said he had two mates,” Brown recalled, “and went off on a bus to fetch them.”
From the instant it opened, the Casbah was a runaway success. The kids who turned up couldn’t believe their eyes. It was dazzling, hot, loud, smoky, young, private—rocking—pulsing with just the right atmosphere. Mo Best offered up “the perfect house,” and the Quarry Men—John, Paul, George, and Ken Brown—brought that house down. Even without a drummer—or a P.A. system—they knocked out the rapturous crowd. Kids, standing “shoulder to shoulder,” swarmed around the band, which was pressed back into a corner that had once functioned as the coal bin. It seemed inconceivable they’d ever disbanded; there wasn’t so much as a wrinkle in their performance.
“Among the songs we performed [that] night,” Ken Brown recalled, “were ‘Long Tall Sally’… and ‘Three Cool Cats,’ which John sang rolling his eyes.” The rest glided by in a fantastic blur, but it was infinitely gratifying. To be performing again, in front of such a great crowd, was so satisfying—and such a relief. Even Mo Best got more than she expected, transferring to the boys the agreed-upon Les Stewart residency that guaranteed them a princely £3 every Saturday night.
More than the music and refreshments, it was the idea of the Casbah that vitalized its members. There was an exclusivity about it, not in the class-restrictive rivalries that isolated—and divided—the British empire but in a celebration of togetherness. Here, belonging was really a function of age, not class or breeding or religion or wealth. Kids came to dance, to talk, and to get away from the enervating grind that had been bequeathed to them by their mostly distant parents. “None of us dreamed that we’d ever have much of anything in our lives,” says Colin Manley, whose band, the Remo Four, later played at the club. “We may have still been in school at that point, but we were already in the System, our lives were pretty well preordained, which for most Liverpool kids meant no diploma, a dead-end job, a loveless marriage, too many kids, never enough money, and lots of beer to drown the burden. So a place like the Casbah was something else entirely. It was outside the System—and it was ours.”
As the Quarry Men enjoyed their run, the Casbah membership spiraled into the thousands. The club became so crowded that after a while you could “just about hear the band.” To cure that, John talked a short, slight guitar player named Harry into “opening for them,” which was nothing more than a ruse, really, amounting to a brief two-song spot in exchange for the use of Harry’s amplifier. “It was a good idea that nearly backfired,” recalls George’s friend Arthur Kelly. “The kid was a disaster. His party piece was a cringe-worthy version of ‘Apple Blossom Time’ that nearly always caused a lynching.” Fortunately, before there was any time for violence, the band plugged in and shook things up with “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Johnny B. Goode” crackling through the cellar on forty watts of juice.
When the boys weren’t performing, they wandered through the crowd, chatting with friends and flirting. “Girls were the main reason you joined a band,” Paul says, citing a condition known to every schoolboy who ever picked up a guitar, and from the start there was never a shortage of them around. Of the many attractive girls who hung around the Casbah, one in particular caught John’s eye. She was an elfin blonde with a tense, wounded look, whom he nicknamed Bubbles, for lack of a proper introduction and because it so unsuited her. In fact, all the guys had noticed her watching them. While not a beautiful girl, she was catlike and intense, in a mysterious kind of way. She also was eager to meet them. “It must have been all over my face that I fancied John,” recalls Bubbles, whose real name is Dot Rhone, “but once it became clear he had a girlfriend, I lost interest.” Instead, she approached Paul with game determination, pretending to be faint in order to get him outside, where they could be by themselves.
Once alone, an “immediate attraction” developed between them. Paul discovered in Dot a person who hardly fit the profile of the other girls at the Casbah. She had grown up in a better section of Liverpool called Childwall, around the corner from Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ future manager. But “it might have been two different worlds,” Dot says, her humble situation being anything unlike Epstein’s glaringly “posh” circumstances. “I didn’t have a normal childhood. My dad was an alcoholic; he never hung on to any money. And the only reason we lived in that neighborhood was because a sickly aunt left the house to my mother.” A year younger than Paul, Dot had gone to Liverpool Institute High School, “the girls’ school across the road from the Inny,” but had left in June, taking a clerk’s job at the Dale Street branch of District Bank in order to support her family. Paul, she believes, was attracted by how needy and impressionable she was, which put her under his sway; she found him “adorably handsome, opinionated,” and loaded with confidence. “He came from the first family I’d ever known that cared about each other so much,” Dot says. “Everyone would gather round the piano, while Jim played songs like ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,’ and sometimes [he] would sing with Paul and Mike.” At a deeper level, they undoubtedly recognized the loneliness in each other’s lives, each absent a parent—in her case because of addiction.
Within days Paul and Dot were an item. A nearly exclusive togetherness during the week quickly became the norm, but Saturdays were reserved for the Casbah, where Dot now joined Cynthia in her new role as inconspicuous cheerleader. “It was amazing how popular the band had become—and how fast,” Dot says, recalling those nights from a vaunted perspective. “Watching them, you could see how effortlessly they engaged the crowd. It was a full-blown mutual admiration society.” Perhaps nobody appreciated it as much as Mona Best, who couldn’t print Casbah membership cards fast enough to satisfy the demand. She was thrilled by “the fantastic scenes outside the house”—interminable queues that snaked across her front lawn, along the drive, and down Hayman’s Green—to say nothing of the club fees and five-pence admission that accrued beyond her wildest expectations. On word of mouth alone, she could pack in four hundred kids before conditions reached a critical stage, when tempers flared and the crowd became uncontrollable, and with the nonstop turnover, as many as 1,300 kids passed through the club on any given Saturday night. Despite the constant crush, parents drifted unobtrusively downstairs to check out the goings-on; policemen on the beat stopped by for a Coke. And everyone had a good word for the house band, whose residency seemed destined to stretch on indefinitely.
Which is why everyone was dismayed when it all soon collapsed.
Stories abound about how the Beatles hemorrhaged money, mostly because there was so damn much of it and no one to tend the purse strings. But in the early days they could tell you where every farthing went. “They didn’t have much… in those days,” Mona Best recalled, “so they’d fight over a halfpenny.”
Inconceivably, the Quarry Men blew off their gig at the Casbah over the equivalent of a whopping seventy-five cents. On the seventh Saturday night that the Quarry Men rocked the Casbah, Ken Brown, who had done a capable job of handling rhythm guitar, turned up suffering from a mighty bout of the flu. He was ordered upstairs, to the Bests’ living room, where he lay slumped across a sofa for the rest of the night. The band went on without him, which didn’t make a speck of difference to their performance, of course, since a fourth guitar was almost as superfluous as the fact that Ken didn’t sing. But he was missed. Ken was “an immensely likeable guy,” whose ongoing work around the club had endeared him to Mo Best and Pete, whom he had encouraged to learn the drums. In the spirit of appreciation, “Mo decided to pay [Ken], even though he didn’t play,” said Pete, who should have heeded the consequences with a keener eye.
According to an observer, John, Paul, and George “went ballistic.” Since Ken hadn’t played, they argued, he didn’t deserve a cut, and they demanded Ken’s share of the fee, which amounted to a measly fifteen shillings. It didn’t matter that the three others each received the amount due them; even if Mo wouldn’t fork over Ken’s share, they stood opposed to his getting it. Nobody, they insisted, was going to get a free ride.
Mona Best was the last person who would yield to a band’s demands, and there was never any effort made to appease them. Said Pete: “She kept Ken’s fifteen bob and gave it to him later.” When the Quarry Men found out, they decided to ankle their residency. “Right, that’s it, then!” Ken Brown remembered Paul shouting before they stormed out of the club.
A few days later, as Pete Best recalled, Ken came up with a solution. They’d form their own band—the Blackjacks—which would get them “back into the business.” Initially, Best balked at the offer. He had only recently taken up the drums after months of tattooing the furniture with “pencils, and later drumsticks.” At the time, the most he could do was “knock beats out” on his thigh, the way successive generations of teenagers have marked time to “Wipeout.” Bright, coordinated, and energetic, Pete could probably muddle his way through some standard rock ’n roll covers, but not capably enough to power a band. But as time wore on, as unexceptional bands passed through the Casbah, the idea seemed to make some sense. Rationalizing, Pete figured that it provided him with a hands-on opportunity to practice and right an unprincipled wrong at the same time, Pete still being “shocked” by the way Ken had been treated by his former bandmates. Little could he have imagined that Brown’s dismissal was a mere dress rehearsal for the sacking that would haunt Pete Best for the rest of his life.
When the Liverpool College of Art reopened in September 1959, John was permitted to enroll in the painting department, working toward a National Diploma in Design, but only on a probationary basis. Having failed his intermediates, only the advocacy of Arthur Ballard allowed him to advance to a permanent area of concentration instead of having to resit the general studies program.
Having stuck his neck out for John, Ballard enlisted the help of his prodigy, Stuart Sutcliffe, to somehow inspire and motivate this problem student. “Stuart was his last hope,” says Bill Harry. “[Arthur] knew if anyone could reach John, it was Stu.”
Somehow, Sutcliffe hit the right note, and before long the two boys began painting together in late-afternoon sessions conducted in an empty studio on the top floor. Long after the other students had gone home, they worked furiously on technique, experimenting with free expression and a nebula of colors to generate a flow of ideas. In what was essentially a painting tutorial, Stuart introduced John to the basics of image and composition, doling out tips on how to control the brush or direct the flow of paint. Sutcliffe taught him how to grind his own paints, which oils produced the most effective mixtures, how to control and exploit the flow of emulsions. Cynthia, who sat framed by the windows, where soft, blue light filtered in off the street, remembered being “fascinated” by the way John took instruction. “Here with no one watching, no one to entertain, and no one to criticize, [he] could relax and learn,” she recalled. “John was having a wonderful time, splashing bold colors across his canvas, throwing sand at it—trying out all sorts of experiments that he would have been too cautious to try in front of anyone else.”
They were a breed apart, and Sutcliffe looked it, too. “Stuart wore tinted glasses in honor of his idol, Cybulski, the so-called Polish James Dean, to say nothing of his underground art heroes,” Harry recalls. “[He] had a lot of innovative ideas about how to dress,” said Rod Murray. “Stuart wore what we called Chelsea boots, Italian pointy-toed [shoes] with side gussets… and one of those old flying jackets made out of the inside of a sheep.” Cynthia referred to Stuart as “a tiddler” because of his size and frail build, but it never detracted from his stature. As Rod Murray pointed out, there is a difference between being weak and being quiet. “Stuart was not an outwardly forceful personality—not insofar as John was—but he was a very strong character. He was small, but determined… a very intense person.” No art student was more respected or better liked. In whatever class Stuart sat down in—painting, drawing, lifework—“a tremendous energy and intensity” filled the room. He painted with power and conviction, and John knew it. In most cases, that would have been enough to drive John into an envious rage, but Stuart didn’t affect him that way. Neither his popularity nor his talent proved threatening to John’s ego. He didn’t flaunt his artistry or try to stick it under John’s nose, and he always encouraged John without making an issue of his deficiencies. It also impressed John that, unlike so many other students he encountered, Stuart wasn’t handed everything on a silver platter. He had no grant, no student subsidy. Whatever “milk money” his mother set aside for him was spent on paint. “Stuart never let on how hard he had it,” says Bill Harry, “but things were really difficult for him at that time. He had practically no money, and you were only allowed a certain amount of free materials from the college. It was never enough. Canvas was expensive, so his art was done on big sheets of cheap foolscap paper; otherwise, he broke up furniture and painted on the unfinished surface. But as hard up as he was, you were always entitled to half of anything he had.” That was Stuart’s power: his sincerity.
“John did all the things that Stuart would have loved to have done if he had the courage,” Stuart’s mother, Millie, recalled. And he had the same passion for music and poetry that Stuart exhibited for art. In fact, John exuded onstage what Stuart felt like in front of an easel, something real and visceral.
By the mid-sixties, the prevailing cultural sensibility would embrace both Shakespeare and Pynchon, Rembrandt and Warhol, Beethoven and the Beatles. But in 1959, in an insular city such as Liverpool, the aesthetic took longer to gain a foothold. The incipient taste was enshrined in popularized “experimental work” such as The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsider, both of which, according to Bill Harry, “were highly regarded” by Stuart and John. Throughout the fall, the two mates were inseparable, reinforcing each other’s pressing passions. And exploring the fringe. John schooled his painting mentor in all the vagaries of rock ’n roll—playing every record he could get his hands on and rhapsodizing about Elvis, Buddy, and Chuck—to which Stuart responded in kind, dragging out museum exhibition catalogues and analyzing John Bratby or Russian abstractionist Nicolas de Stael in great detail, explaining the composition of each picture. In the evenings, they would head over to Ye Cracke, tanking up on half-pints of beer, and then wind up at the Jac, drinking coffee and talking until closing time.
For John, it was an idyllic semester. He practically moved into the little Percy Street flat—“kipping in [Stuart’s] room” most weekdays, much to Mimi’s consternation—where there was always space to paint, play guitar, or cuddle with Cynthia. It provided a place to exchange ideas and escape the loneliness of Menlove Avenue, and Rod and Stuart were happy to have him around. When they got tired of working or just bored, a party solved the doldrums. They could always count on an interesting mix of acquaintances turning up, not just other art students but people they’d met in Ye Cracke: nurses, dockworkers, faculty—even Paul and George, whose presence confirmed their boost into John’s orbit. Music was never a problem. Stuart had an old turntable, Rod a tape recorder, and with John handling music chores, enough records to go all night, which was usually the case.
By early November, however, the parties stopped as every effort was being made to accommodate Sutcliffe, who was preoccupied almost obsessively, often lapsing into long, trancelike work sessions, painting for the prestigious biennial John Moores Exhibition at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. Underwritten by the city’s most eminent philanthropist, the show was a tour de force of local talent and eagerly anticipated throughout the year. All students at the college were encouraged to submit work, even though it was hardly ever accepted. Stuart, however, was determined to make the final cut and had been struggling with a “monumental painting”—in size alone, its eight-foot-square proportions filled the bill—that captured the impetuosity and restlessness of his generation. His progress was excruciatingly slow, but worth the effort: the canvas had “real resonance,” its scrim of irregular shapes on a field of green and blue shading giving off a rhythmic, abstract energy that lent legitimacy to Stuart’s mission.
The painting, which was actually done on a board, had to be assembled in two pieces and hinged because of its size. “We carried half of the painting down to the Walker Art Gallery,” recalled Rod Murray, whose own entry, a piece of sculpture, had already been rejected. “Something happened, and the other half never [made it, but] the half that got carried down got into the exhibition—and got sold!” And to no less formidable a collector than the show’s esteemed sponsor, the John Moores Foundation, which paid £65 for the piece.
Stuart was ecstatic. The fabled arbiter of the local art scene had reached across a vast field of inveterate talent and conferred honor on a young abstractionist. It was the ultimate endorsement. To be selected for the exhibition and achieve critical success, along with his first sale! The combination proved thrilling, to say nothing of a financial boon. “All of a sudden Stuart had some serious money,” Murray said. How he spent it would be unforgettable.
John undoubtedly felt the loss of his friend’s attention, but if he was stung or resentful, it didn’t show. Eager to harness the progress made at the Casbah, he rechanneled his energy into the band. Paul and George shared his urge to push ahead. But in the fall of 1959, logistics presented some uncommon obstacles. Paul remained close by, at the Liverpool Institute, where he had advanced into the Remove* and joined the regular lunchtime crowd at the art college. But George, who by this time had become an integral part of the band, was unable to tag along.
At the end of the term, no doubt in response to his persistent truancy, George received a particularly dismal report showing how he’d “failed everything”—art, language, literature, math, science, even phys. ed.; attached to the bottom was a scathing rebuke by the headmaster that said: “It is very difficult to give an assessment of this boy’s work—because he hasn’t done any.” If the comment was intended as a wake-up call, it failed. George was already thin-skinned and intellectually insecure; nothing rankled him more than authority. He was especially infuriated by criticism from a teacher—“some old fellow chundering on”—and in retaliation he quit school.
Arthur Kelly says, “His parents were fairly easygoing about it”; however, it is reasonable to assume his father’s profound disappointment. Using Louise to run interference, George bumped aimlessly around the neighborhood each day, hoping to stumble into a trade. “At that stage, he didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do with his life,” says Kelly, who remained a close friend. Everyone weighed in with a suggestion, one more implausible than the next. Days stretched into months. Eventually, at Harry’s insistence, George took the city’s apprentice exam but failed. Soon afterward, a youth employment officer referred him to a window-dressing job at Blackler’s, one of Liverpool’s thriving department stores, which led to an apprenticeship there, at a salary of £1.50 a week. The job came as a relief, but having entered the workforce, it became impossible for George to spend his lunch hour singing.
Only rarely that fall was the band able to do something meaningful together. With their boycotting of the Casbah, few gigs provided much of a satisfying audience, or adequate money. A handful of competitions became the band’s lifeline, keeping them in front of a crowd, but they were simply going through the motions; there was nothing of substance to be gained from those opportunities.
Determined to break cleanly with the past, they entered the Star Search competition as Johnny and the Moondogs. Most likely they appropriated the name from Alan Freed, whose early radio broadcasts on WJW went out in syndication as The Moondog Show. It may also have been one of those spur-of-the-moment inspirations that took shape on the registration form. Either way, it was characteristic, just odd enough, combining the right touch of goon humor and irreverence necessary to rattle the traditionalists. “Moondogs,” like “Beatles,” was a bit playful, a bit absurd. It could go anywhere and not seem out of the groove.
Johnny and the Moondogs performed at the Empire on October 18, the second Sunday of the auditions. The band, “singing brilliantly,” qualified for the local finals in two weeks’ time and, following a weeklong elimination, snared a berth at the runoff in Manchester. A larger number of acts than expected had turned out at the Manchester Hippodrome on November 15, 1959. Registration was a daylong process. “We got there in the morning,” says Ray Ennis, of the Swinging Bluegenes, “and there was a queue right around the whole place. Hundreds of kids, dragging instruments and amps. It was four o’clock before we got inside the front door.”
Johnny and the Moondogs took the train from Liverpool, arriving with a small entourage of friends in the nick of time for rehearsals. “Everyone hung around backstage until the audience was admitted,” recalls Arthur Kelly. “Then we all went out front in order to whistle and applaud as loud as we could so the Clap-o-Meter would hit a certain level.” The band performed a delightful rendition of Buddy Holly’s “Think It Over,” with John handling the vocal in front of Paul and George’s nicely tapered harmonies, and as they came offstage to rousing applause there was a feeling that they could win the top prize. It all depended on the finale, when each act was reintroduced for a deciding round of applause.
But as the show wore on, time weighed in against them. With the introduction of each new act, John’s eyes searched out a clock over the stagehands’ lit console, nervously noting the hour. The last bus and train left for Liverpool at 9:47; they had to make it or face being stranded in Manchester with less than a pound between them, which was out of the question.
At 9:20 there were still more than a dozen acts set to go on, too many to permit a reappearance. No question about it, time had run out. Their chance for a TV spot was over. As John, Paul, and George stalked out, followed by two or three long-faced friends, there was a lot of bitter grumbling, although John was unusually subdued. As they were going out the stage door, where various instruments had been stacked, John suddenly veered off from the pack. “He’d had his eye on the guitars other [performers] had left there,” Kelly says, “and as we hit the exit, he just picked up a little electric cutaway number and out he went.”
After two years bashing around that “old tatty piece of junk,” John Lennon finally had his first electric guitar—“nicked,” he later said, “so the trip wasn’t a total loss.”
As 1959 drew to a close, the boys spent more time with girlfriends than with one another. John and Cynthia, according to friends closest to the couple, were “besotted with each other.” For his part, Paul stopped playing the field and settled down with Dot Rhone. As a couple, they had an appealingly unthreatening air. They discovered each other to be solicitous and sensual, gentle and clumsy, with Paul at times taking on a paternal and sympathetic role. Once, at a friend’s house, Dot happened to mention that she’d been standing all day and he began to massage her feet, stroking them as though they were precious pets. And yet, at the time the gesture felt almost preposterous.
Eventually Paul’s attention grew relentless, almost disparaging. His simple gregariousness turned uncompromising and willful. Paul was immensely charming, but there was a darker side. He had a need—Dot believes a compulsion—to control every situation. As John had done with Cynthia, he began to pick out her clothes, redesign her makeup. Dot remembers how much it pleased Paul to stand beside her and study her appearance, then, in a roundabout way, critique the way she looked—and suggest how to improve upon it. On one occasion, he insisted that she have her hair done and produced money to pay for it. Not wanting to displease him, Dot went off to the beauty parlor. “Unfortunately, they did [my hair] in a terrible-looking beehive,” she says. “Paul was furious when he saw it. He told me to go home and not to call him until it grew out again.”
She detected other changes in Paul that proved equally disagreeable. He had an almost stuffy, explosive air of self-importance, with his simple superiority, cool poise, and weatherproof rightness. He scorned any sign of self-confidence in her. And Dot, pricked by love, submitted. As a rule, she did not impose her will on him, certainly never when they were among friends. She would sit quietly and smile tensely for entire evenings at the Jacaranda while Paul and John discussed music. If Paul glared, she would freeze like a rabbit. “We weren’t allowed to open our mouths,” Dot says of her and Cynthia’s attendance at these nightly discussions. “They’d talk all night, and we just listened.”
One day, just before the end of the year, John announced that Stuart Sutcliffe was moving into a spacious student flat near school, where they’d have plenty of room to rehearse. Without delay, everyone decided to meet over there and check it out.
Stuart’s flat was on the first floor of a Georgian-style town house called Hillary Mansions, located directly catercorner to the art college at 3 Gambier Terrace. When the guys walked in, they found a strikingly familiar student layout: a warren of sparsely furnished rooms, two “bohemian” girls—Diz Morris and Margaret Duxburry, who had moved in to help shoulder the “ridiculously expensive” £3-a-week rent—a revolving-door cast of visitors, and enough disarray to reinforce its reputation as a crash pad. But whereas Stuart’s previous flat had been a cramped one-room affair, this place was rambling: a huge high-ceilinged living room warmed by a fireplace faced the front, along with a smaller bedroom, which the two girls quickly claimed. At the end of a long corridor was the kitchen, a bathroom, and an enormous back room with two walk-in closets. “Stuart had the big back room,” said Rod Murray, “and we put all the easels in there.” A gallery of paintings went up on the walls.
John, Paul, and George started playing in the back room almost from the day Stuart moved in. They met there each evening, after Blackler’s closed, and lit into two dozen or more songs culled from an expanding repertoire of current hits. No one remembers them working on originals, although it is likely that a few were sprinkled in the mix. Nevertheless, they touched off a festive atmosphere each night, as friends poured into the flat to listen and dance. To many, it was “like a never-ending party,” but almost immediately “we got complaints from above and below,” Rod Murray recalled.
By then, John had more or less moved into Gambier Terrace, sharing the back room with Stuart, who was happy for the company. Although John had shown little interest in literature while at Quarry Bank, he tore greedily through Stuart’s books, including Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, one of the titles with cachet that Stuart had thrust at him rather daringly one night, with the challenge to “expand his Scouser mind.”
John was doing more than expanding his mind. By the end of 1959, it was evident to him that if the band were to be elevated in any meaningful way, they’d need to make adjustments. Without a bass and drums, it just wasn’t rock ’n roll. They needed to revamp—or forget the whole thing.
Sometime right after Christmas, he and Stuart were meandering through the frost-rimed cemetery in the Anglican cathedral, directly across the street from Gambier Terrace. It was a favorite haunt of theirs; the boys spent hours, sometimes entire afternoons, walking around the windy, saucer-shaped slopes that hemmed the church near the front courtyard. They could see the glinting dome of the Royal Insurance Company Building in the distance, and beyond it the brooding Mersey, with a queue of boats trawling the Narrows channel.
Ordinarily, John loved to peruse the sooty headstones half-buried in the spongy ground. No matter how many he examined, there were untold more to keep him entertained. But this day, he seemed distracted. While Stuart crouched by an overgrown plot, John stared off into the landscape. Finally, haltingly, he said, “Now [that] you’ve got all this money, Stu, you can buy a [bass] and join our group.”
It was a calculated risk in more ways than one. He certainly didn’t want Stuart to feel taken advantage of. And there was a greater harmony to consider. Would he fit in with Paul and George? The fellows all got along well—as friends. That simplified their social lives, but bands had a personality all their own and required communication of an entirely different kind. Painting was one thing, but rhythm? Could Stuart pick up the beat or carry a tune? For that matter, would he be able to learn how to play the instrument? These were all questions that John had no answers to.
But Stuart took only a long moment to mull it over before responding to John’s offer. “Stuart thought it was a wonderful idea,” his sister Pauline remembered. “If anything, it was the image, not the music, that was attractive to him. He liked the whole [concept] of pop and Buddy Holly and Elvis—how they looked.” Years before aesthetics became the cornerstone of rock ’n roll, Stuart knew that image was everything. As for the bass, Stuart decided it’d be relatively easy to learn. His mother had insisted on piano lessons, which he’d taken scrupulously since the age of nine. There was the bugle that he’d played in the Air Training Corps. And his father had “taught him a few chords on [the] guitar.” The hardest part about the bass, he figured, was getting hold of one.
As it turned out, that was the least of his problems. He found a sunburst Hofner President at Hessy’s Music Store that filled the bill nicely. Stories about how he turned over the entire Moores commission in exchange for the bass are legion. According to one version, his father found the guitar while snooping around Stuart’s room and pitched a fit about its price. In fact, using a bit of creative financing, a monthly purchase plan was worked out with Frank Hesselberg so that only a modest £5 deposit snared him the bass.
Stuart may well have been the natural choice, but his decision to play music perplexed his fellow artists. Bill Harry, for one, remembers the irritation he felt when Stuart flashed the new bass as though exhibiting a finished oil painting. “I said to him, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’ ” Harry recalls. “ ‘You’re passionate about art, not music!’ ” Stuart shook off such concern with bemused disregard. To Harry’s objection, he responded soothingly: “No, it’s all right. I think it’s art.” He had decided to dedicate himself to the band with “as much seriousness and intensity” as he approached painting. “And anyway,” Stuart told him, “they’re going to be the greatest. I want to be a part of it.”