John Lennon: The Life (10 page)

As if to prove the fad had done no serious harm, John’s school report for the 1955 summer term was considerably less of a disaster than usual.
English
: “He is capable of good work and has done quite well…a good knowledge of the books.”
History
: “He has tried hard and worked well.”
Art
: “Very satisfactory.”
Handwork
: “Satisfactory progress.”
Physical training
: “(height 5, 6 and a half, weight 9 st, 4 lbs [130 pounds]) F[airly] satisfactory.”
Geography
: “Undoubtedly trying harder.”
General science
: “An encouraging result. His work has been satisfactory but his behaviour in class is not always so.” The only wholly negative entries were for French (“disappointing” through fondness for “obtaining a cheap laugh in class”) and Religious Knowledge (“His work has been of a low standard”).

“The best report he has had for a long time,” noted a surprised Ernie Taylor in the space reserved for headmaster’s comment. “I hope this means that he has turned over a new leaf.”

H
e first heard about Elvis Presley from a Quarry Bank classmate named Don Beatty, one of the participants in the Great Dinner Tickets Swindle. Don had a copy of the
New Musical Express
—at that time rather a rarity in the far northwest—and pointed out a reference to America’s newest rock-’n’-roll sensation and his just-released new record, “Heartbreak Hotel.”

John reacted guardedly at first, remembering what a letdown
Rock Around the Clock
had been. “The music papers were saying Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra.

‘Heartbreak Hotel’ sounded a corny title, and his name seemed strange in those days. But then when I heard it, it was the end for me…I remember rushing home with the record and saying ‘He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray
and
Tennessee Ernie Ford.’”

When Presley erupted into popular music and mythology that spring of 1956, he was by no means the first entertainer to cause mass hysteria. During the 1920s, the silent screen idol Rudolf Valentino and the prototype crooner Rudy Vallee had each driven female audiences to frenzy—Vallee earning the nickname of “the guy with the cock in his voice,” Valentino attracting a screaming crowd of ten thousand even to his funeral. Two decades later, the young Frank Sinatra inspired a whole new species of female worshipper, the “bobbysoxer,” whose demented reactions at concerts ultimately competed in newsworthiness with the singer himself. Nor was such incontinence purely emotional: after Sinatra’s legendary opening at the New York Paramount Theater in 1947, it was found that many bobby-soxers, unable to contain themselves, had urinated where they sat.

All this was taken to uncharted new levels, however, by a twenty-one-year-old former truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, with dyed black hair and the face of a supercilious baby. For Presley did more than touch the trigger of feminine mass fantasy; he also gave release to the tension that had built up in young men with no more global conflict to burn off their testosterone. Here, rolled into one person, was a Valentino with a voice, a Sinatra with still greater power over young girls’ bladders, a James Dean in close-up more mesmeric than even Hollywood could contrive—in short, a rock-’n’-roll hero who looked every bit as gloriously disruptive as he sounded. The Phoney War of plaid jackets, soppy smiles, and kiss curls was over: all-out bombardment had finally begun.

For the vast majority of Britons, Presley could not have been more incomprehensible if freshly beamed down from Mars. Bill Haley at least had a name that was recognizably human (one he happened to share with the current editor of
The Times
). But “Elvis Presley” was the strangest configuration of syllables yet to have crossed the Atlantic—more so than Joe DiMaggio, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., or even Liberace, which some newspapers felt obliged to render phonetically (“Lee-ber-arch-ee”). Commentators were also intrigued by the fact that Presley performed his gyrations while simultaneously playing—or appearing to play—a guitar slung around his neck. Americans were familiar with the guitar as a normal accessory for
singers of both country and blues; in Britain it was perhaps the most anonymous of all musical instruments, glimpsed fleetingly in the back rows of dance bands or as shadowy silhouettes behind Spanish flamenco dancers.

When John first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” the whole edifice of rumor and ridicule that the media that created around Presley instantly melted away. All he needed to know was in the song’s opening fanfare—that anguished, echoey cry of “Well, since my baby left me…” answered by double stabs of high treble electric guitar. It was, in fact, not rock ’n’ roll or even a ballad, but a blues shout in a traditional pattern that Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson would instantly have recognized. But while blues songs deal with adult themes, “Heartbreak Hotel” reached directly to the primary adolescent emotion, melodramatic self-pity. For the first time, any spotty youth dumped by his girlfriend, for whatever good reason, could now aspire to this metaphorical refuge for “broken-hearted lovers,” “down at the end of Lonely Street.”

Far from the mindless nonsense Presley’s critics accused him of peddling, the lyrics were neat and skillful enough to be dissected in a Quarry Bank literature test, the hotel metaphor sustained by a bellhop whose “tears keep flowing” and a “desk clerk dressed in black.” The arrangement had the visceral simplicity of blues played live in the wee, small hours, switching between foot-stomping bass, jangly whorehouse piano, and jagged guitar half-chords suggesting the bottleneck style of Delta bluesmen. Those riffs are still potent today after ten thousand hearings; to an adolescent in 1956 who’d never heard a guitar played as an offensive weapon, they were stupefying. No sound ever had been, or ever would be, more perfectly tuned to hormones going berserk.

That May, a second Presley single, “Blue Suede Shoes,” joined “Heartbreak Hotel” in the UK Top 20; in August came a third, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” and in September a fourth, “Hound Dog.” Each drew John still further into this intoxicating new world where guitars rang like carillons of victory bells, pianos pounded like jackhammers, and drums spat like machine guns. Each announced more joyously than the last that life need not be
the gray, humdrum vista he and his fellow war babies had always known. As he himself put it: “Rock ’n’ roll was real. Everything else was unreal.”

Film clips of Presley’s American TV appearances now also began to filter through, revealing him to be almost ludicrously good-looking, albeit in a baleful, smoldering style more usually associated with female glamour icons. Here, indeed, was history’s one and only male pinup for straight males. In common with his other British converts, John obsessively read and reread every newspaper story about Presley, cut out and saved every magazine picture of him, pored over every detail of his hair, clothes, and sublimely sullen face for what it might reveal of his private character and lifestyle. At Mendips he chattered so endlessly about his new hero that an exasperated Mimi finally brought down the guillotine. “It was nothing but Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,” she recalled. “In the end I said ‘Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner and tea.’”

Like thousands of other boys who had never previously cared a button for their wardrobe or grooming, he began to model his hair, his dress, his whole being, on Presley’s. Like many Quarry Bank boys, he did what he could to Elvis-ize his school uniform, fastening only the bottom of his three blazer buttons to create a drape effect and stretching his gold-and-black school tie into the nearest possible semblance of a Slim Jim. The great problem was the trousers, which men and boys alike still wore in the baggy cut that had prevailed since the 1920s. Scarcely any men’s outfitters yet stocked ready-made “drainpipes,” so one’s only recourse was to take a conventional pair to an alterations tailor, sartorial equivalent of the back-street abortionist, and have their cuffs tapered from twenty-four to sixteen or (in cases of ultimate daring) fourteen inches.

No fiercer controversy raged in British families of the mid-1950s than this. No matter that the British Empire had been largely built by men in narrow trousers, nor that every palace, stately home, and museum in the land thronged with portraits of narrow-trousered kings, dukes, prime ministers, and generals. The style was now identified with lawless, low-class Teddy Boys and, by the more knowing,
with homosexuals—although, paradoxically, it was deemed quite respectable in fawn cavalry twill, if worn by off-duty Guards officers together with riding jackets and tweed caps.

At Mendips, Mimi was predictably horrified and outraged by her nephew’s attempted metamorphosis into a “common” Teddy Boy. She might be unable to stop John ruining the hang of his tailor-made blazer and leaving his top shirt button permanently agape above his mutilated school tie. She might not have prevented Signor Bioletti at Penny Lane from restyling his nice, wavy hair, as she put it, “like an overgrown lavatory brush.” But with trousers she dug her heels in: John was absolutely forbidden either to buy “drainies” or have any of his existing pairs tapered. His response was to smuggle some to a compliant tailor and wear the finished product only outside Mimi’s field of vision. He would deposit them at Nigel Walley’s or Pete Shotton’s and change into them there, or leave Mendips wearing them underneath an ordinary pair of trousers, peeling off this outer layer once safely out of Mimi’s sight.

One grown-up, at least, could be relied on not to shudder at rock ’n’ roll or pour scorn on its lip-curling godhead. John’s mother Julia adored Presley’s records, thought he was dishy to look at, and relished all the ways he was upsetting the generation whose values had always so oppressed her. It was Julia who, daring Mimi’s wrath, bought John his first real rock-’n’-roll clothes—a colored (as opposed to plain gray or white) shirt, a pair of black drainpipe jeans, a “shortie” raincoat with padded shoulders. When a kitten was given to John’s two small half sisters, Julia and Jackie, their mother named it Elvis.

With every passing week of 1956, the heavenly noises from across the Atlantic multiplied and diversified. From New Orleans came Antoine “Fats” Domino, a singer-pianist with the body of a whale and the face of a kindly Burmese cat, who had already been around and playing much this same stuff since 1949. From St. Louis came Charles “Chuck” Berry, a loose-limbed youth with a lounge-lizard mustache, who not only wrote and performed his witty anthems in the former Whites Only realm of expensive cars and high schools, but also simultaneously played cherry-red lead guitar, jackknifing his skinny knees or loping across the stage in profile like a duck.
From Macon, Georgia, came a former dishwasher named Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a shock-haired imp endowed with the dual gift of being able to roar like an erupting volcano and ululate like an entire Bedouin tribe in mourning.

If black rock-’n’-rollers, like Presley himself, teetered on the edge of comedy, Richard’s exultant gibberish (“Tutti-frutti O-rooty…Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom!”) was a deep-South descendant of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” “The most exciting thing…was when he screamed just before the solo,” John later recalled. “It used to make your hair stand on end. When I heard it, it was so great, I couldn’t speak. You know how it is when you are torn. Elvis was bigger than religion in my life…I didn’t want to leave Elvis. We all looked at each other, but I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, even in my mind.”

As with almost every other new American idea, gauche and unconvincing British replicas quickly followed. In the wake of Presley’s onslaught, a young Londoner named Larry Parnes launched the United Kingdom’s first native rock-’n’-roller—a cockney merchant seaman named Tommy Hicks, now renamed Tommy Steele. Provided with the requisite exploding hair and Presley-style guitar, Steele drew crowds of screaming girls wherever he appeared and had several Top 10 hits. But his whole marketing exemplified the notion of rock ’n’ roll as a passing fad or soon-to-be-unmasked confidence trick. One of Larry Parnes’s first acts was to move him into cabaret by booking him into London’s Café de Paris in the footsteps of Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward. In little more than a year, his career as a teenage idol would be metaphorically wound up by a film entitled
The Tommy Steele Story
.

Even Steele’s patent harmlessness could not mitigate adult Britain’s hatred and terror of rock ’n’ roll and the resolve to stamp it out, if not by frontal attack and ridicule, then by attrition. The BBC carried no news items about even its most famous performers and mentioned its very name only with lip-curled distaste. Apart from records, its main public outlets were jukeboxes in the newfangled espresso coffee bars, which explained why such places were always packed with teenagers and also why adults viewed
them rather like speakeasies in Prohibition America. At traveling fairs, rock ’n’ roll would blare out over carousels and bumper cars, so strengthening its perceived links with the grubby, the dishonest, and the violent.

The steadiest source of supply was Radio Luxembourg, out in mysterious mainland Europe, which operated a daily English-language music service playing all the latest rock-’n’-roll hits with American-style disc jockeys, advertisements, and station IDs. But Luxembourg did not come on the air until 8:00 p.m., and reception on British wirelesses was always erratic. Like all teenagers up and down the land, John listened in late at night with a portable radio at low volume under the bedclothes so that Mimi would not hear it.

With rock fizzing in his veins around the clock, even things he had once regarded as treats now seemed irksomely unreal. During the school summer holidays of 1956, he paid his usual long visit to his Aunt Mater, Uncle Bert, and cousin Stanley in Edinburgh, accompanied by Aunt Nanny, her nine-year-old son, Michael, and Harrie’s nine-year-old son, David. (Husbands seldom featured in these inter-sister excursions.) Part of the time was spent at Uncle Bert’s croft in Durness, Sutherland, near Cape Wrath, the furthermost northwesterly tip of Scotland. This was a working farm, set in vast, unspoiled tracts of sheep-dotted moorland and peat bogs. The family party roughed it in a primitive farmhouse, lit by oil lamps and candles, and noisy with the screeches of Mater’s pet parrot, Harry Parry.

As well as running the croft, Uncle Bert was carrying out extensive improvements, and John and young Michael and David found themselves allotted a punishing schedule of heavy manual work. “We were scything hay, building dry stone walls, carting wheelbarrow-loads of sand,” Michael Cadwallader remembers. “John soon got fed up with that, and wasn’t thrilled by the company of two nine-year-old boys. He obviously couldn’t wait to leave.”

R
ock ’n’ roll had no fiercer enemy in Britain than followers of traditional jazz, who either did not know or preferred to forget that the two were actually first cousins. Jazz had always overlapped with blues and country, the twin streams that produced Elvis Pres
ley. The more enlightened traditional jazz bandleaders, like Humphrey Lyttelton, acknowledged this by incorporating both into their repertoire, even occasionally bringing over American bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy to make guest appearances at their concerts. However, in music, as everywhere else, the British class system held firm. Rock-’n’-rollers were firmly bracketed at the most unsavory end of the lower working class, while jazzers were middle-class student types who wore striped college scarves and drank half pints of cider.