John Lennon: The Life (11 page)
The most archivally minded trad bandleader of pre-rock-’n’-roll times was the trombonist Chris Barber. Since well before Presley hit Britain, Barber’s shows had featured his foxy-faced banjo player, Tony, aka “Lonnie,” Donegan, on guitar with a small rhythm section, performing in an otherwise forgotten American folk style known as skiffle. The word (like jazz itself) was onomatopoeic, harking back to the bleak Depression era of the thirties, when poor whites, unable to afford conventional instruments, would beat out a shuffly rhythm on makeshift ones like kitchen washboards, empty boxes, and trashcan lids.
In January 1956, Donegan and a three-strong skiffle group scored a surprise hit with “Rock Island Line,” a train song associated with the thirties’ blues giant Huddie (“Leadbelly”) Ledbetter. Undoubtedly helped by the word
rock
in its title (though the reference was purely geological) it reached number eight in Britain, was accepted for U.S. release on the London label, and by April stood at tenth place in the American charts. For any British-made record to catch on in America was rare enough; for one to do so by reinterpreting such a uniquely American idiom was unprecedented.
British skiffle was essentially boys’ music, a gift out of the blue to boys like John who had been just too young for rock ’n’ roll’s first uprising and felt excluded from the tough Teddy Boy culture that now monopolized it. Skiffle was rock ’n’ roll in a milder, more socially acceptable form, also intoxicatingly American but without the taint of sexuality or violence. In its Anglicized version, it drew on every ethnic source—blues, country, folk, and jazz—though its young British performers seldom knew one genre from another, let alone understood what social conditions had inspired the songs or what
pain or anger or sense of social injustice had gone into their creation. All that mattered was the frantic, pattering beat and those magic references to railroads, penitentiaries, and chain gangs.
Elvis Presley had made the guitar an unreachable symbol of glamour and sexual allure to young British males; now Lonnie Donegan made it a reachable one. For skiffle followed the traditional twelve-bar blues pattern of four chords, in their simplest versions requiring only one or two fingers. Anyone could play them, pretty much instantaneously.
Skiffle became the British pop sensation of 1956–57, relegating even Presley and rock ’n’ roll to the sidelines. Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle group began a run of Top 10 hits that would not be surpassed until the next decade, with genuine or ersatz folk titles such as “Lost John,” “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie,” “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O,” and “Cumberland Gap.” Record companies began a frantic hunt for alternative skiffle stars, concentrating their efforts on London’s Soho district, specifically the 2 I’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, where Tommy Steele had made some early live appearances. A fledgling record producer, the Parlophone label’s George Martin, advanced his career just a little by finding his way to the 2 I’s and signing up a skiffle quintet named the Vipers.
Most important, skiffle electrified ordinary youths, far away from London, who had never considered themselves musical and once would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up and sing in public. All over the country, youthful skiffle groups were formed with names hopefully evoking the great American open road—the Ramblers, the Nomads, the Streamliners, the Cottonpickers. Kitchens were stripped of washboards and brooms; guitars that had gathered dust for years in music-shop windows disappeared overnight. In an echo of not-so-distant Austerity years, the newspapers were soon reporting a national guitar shortage.
A few would-be boy skifflers did not start as absolute beginners, thanks to fathers, older brothers, or uncles who were pro or semipro musicians. But only a very few can have owed their head start to their mothers, as John did. For Julia could play the banjo, an instrument even more unexpectedly catapulted into fashion than the
guitar. Well before skiffle arrived, she had begun teaching John to pick out single-string versions of “Little White Lies” or “Girl of My Dreams” on the sound principle that if he could play an instrument, he’d always be popular. But now the banjo was forgotten. “I used to read the ads for guitars,” he would recall, “and just ache for one. Like everyone else, I used God for this one thing I wanted: ‘Please God, give me a guitar.’”
His Aunt Mimi has gone down in history as the person who bought John his first guitar, launching him on his roundabout path to immortality. Many times would she later recount how, weary of his endless pleas and nagging, she took him by bus down into central Liverpool and paid out £17 she could ill afford at Hessy’s music store in Whitechapel. Mimi certainly did buy John a guitar, and at some financial sacrifice, but that was a step or two further along the path. The first one he owned, and used until long after his skills had outgrown it, was given to him by Julia.
Whether that was the first guitar he played is another matter. John himself was to recall initially borrowing one from another boy and experimenting rather inconclusively with it before he got his own. This may well have been in the interval between being promised his heart’s desire by his mother and actually holding the wondrous object in his hands. After several weeks’ unsuccessful search around Liverpool, Julia finally obtained one by mail order on the installment plan. No record of the vendor has survived; the likeliest one seems to have been a mail-order firm named Headquarters and General Supplies of Coldharbour Lane, London SE5. At around the moment John got lucky, H & G announced their acquisition of “1,000 only” Gallotone Champion guitars, a mass-produced make imported from South Africa. The cost was £10 19s 6d (£10.95) each, or 10 shillings (50p) deposit and eighteen two-weekly payments of 18s 11d (90p). The guitar was an acoustic Spanish flamenco-style model but with steel rather than gut strings, strummed not with the fingers but with a tortoiseshell plectrum. Inside the sound hole was a label saying
GUARANTEED NOT TO SPLIT
.
He was not the only Quarry Bank pupil able to flaunt such a status symbol in that autumn term of 1956. A fellow member of Woolton
house, a studious, scientifically minded boy named Eric Griffiths, had also got hold of a Spanish-style guitar similar to John’s in size, shape, and cheapness. Although the two boys had never been especially friendly, they agreed to go for guitar lessons together with a tutor in Hunts Cross. However, the tutor wanted them to learn to read music, which neither could be bothered to do. The easy shortcut suggested by Julia was that she should tune their six-string guitars like a four-string banjo—that is, using only the guitar’s four thinnest treble strings and ignoring the two thick bass ones. Then she herself could teach them all the chords they needed for the music they wanted to play.
From here on, there was no stopping John. Whenever Pete Shotton or Nigel Walley visited Mendips, they would find him seated on the end of his bed, struggling to stretch his left hand into a C or G chord shape, pressing down hard and rippling the pick again and again until the sound rang clear and true, oblivious of the painful grooves that the steel strings cut into his fingertips. “He’d sit there strumming,” Nigel remembers, “singing any words that came into his head. In a couple of minutes, he’d have a tune going.”
Mimi tried to protest about the neglect of his schoolwork, especially with GCE (General Certificate of Education) exams now only a few months away, but to no avail; as Liverpudlians say, never more aptly than here, he was “lost.” From the kitchen or living room, Mimi would shout an admonition destined to be given back to her one day, chidingly, engraved on a mock-ceremonial plaque: “The guitar’s all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.”
According to Eric Griffiths, neither John nor he had thought of starting their own skiffle group until another Quarry Bank boy, George Lee, suggested it one day during break. Alas for the donor of this stupendously bright idea, he himself was not to join or have anything whatsoever to do with the group that resulted. More than a year was to pass before its personnel included anyone named George.
John, as usual, refused to consider any enterprise that did not include his fellow Outlaw Pete Shotton. This being skiffle, Pete’s lack of even the smallest particle of musical talent was not an issue. He
took on the role of washboard player, for which the sole qualification was possession of a washboard—not as straightforward as it might appear, since skifflemania had also created a national washboard shortage. The group was initially called the Blackjacks, but within about a week Pete Shotton suggested something more in tune with the skiffling ethos of hoboes and chain gangs. Quarry Bank’s school song had a line in which the pupils apostrophized themselves as “Quarry men, old before our birth…” Quarries were where chain gangs worked, and John and Pete indubitably regarded themselves as convicts at hard labor. So their skiffle group became the Quarrymen.
Two more recruits quickly emerged from their immediate circle of friends in Woolton house. (George Lee belonged to a rival house, Aigburth, which may perhaps account for his exclusion.) One was the studious Rod Davis, playing the banjo his parents had recently bought him on a trip to Wales. The other was a boy known to John—and featured in his cartoon gallery—as Bill “Smell Type” Smith, plunking the one-string skiffle “bass” composed of a broomstick and an empty tea chest. To make the tea chest less starkly utilitarian, Rod’s mother covered it in brown wallpaper, on which musical notes and a large treble clef were then outlined in white.
Most skiffle groups featured no percussion other than strummed guitars and the rattle of the washboard player’s thimble-capped fingers. If drummers did feature in the lineup, they tended to play only a single snare drum on a stand. The Quarrymen, however, started out with the luxury of a drummer in possession of his own complete kit (something that would seldom come along quite so easily again). He was not a Quarry Bank pupil but an acquaintance of Rod and Eric named Colin Hanton, who had already left school to become an apprentice upholsterer at the Guy Rogers furniture factory in Speke. At eighteen, he was two years older than the others, though his diminutive build and innocent face made him look younger—so much so that he had to carry his birth certificate around with him to prove to pub landlords that he was of the legal drinking age.
Strictly speaking, he was not quite in the other Quarrymens’ social bracket; nor had he any performing experience beyond playing along
with jazz records at home; nor was he nearly as much interested in percussion as he was in downing pints of black velvet (Guinness stout mixed with cider) at every possible opportunity. Such considerations were easily waived in view of the almost brand-new drums that came with him. And, working man or not, he seemed happy enough to throw in his lot with a gaggle of schoolboys, even getting a printer friend to stencil
QUARRY MEN
(splitting the name for space reasons) on the side of his bass drum.
From the beginning, as Hanton remembers, John naturally took on the role of leader. “He was the only singer in the group, so he was the one who said what we played and in what order. And, if we wanted to sound any good, we had to learn to play the songs he knew.”
Prophetically, there was soon upheaval in the Quarrymen’s lineup. Although Bill Smith had seemed keen enough to play tea-chest bass, he proved so bad about turning up for rehearsals that the others unanimously voted him out. A resentful Smell-Type retaliated by holding the tea chest hostage at his house: when all requests for its return were ignored, John led a night expedition to retrieve it from the Smiths’ garage. After this, the role of bass player was divided between Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan, and Ivan’s Liverpool Institute friend, Len Garry.
The Quarrymen’s repertoire at first consisted mainly of Lonnie Donegan songs: “Cumberland Gap,” “Lost John,” “Gamblin’ Man,” “Wabash Cannonball.” As well as “Rock Island Line,” Leadbelly’s blues oeuvre supplied another couple of easily accessible four-chorders, the upbeat “Cotton Fields” and the doleful “Midnight Special.” Rod Davis, a passionate folk-music fan, introduced Burl Ives numbers like “Worried Man Blues,” while John would do the occasional country number, like Hank Williams’s “Honky Tonk Blues.” He had, in fact, been a fan of Williams—the prototype singer-songwriter—well before Presley came along, and been conscious of the strong country-music following among Merseyside’s Irish population since he was a small boy. The first guitar he ever remembered seeing had been played “by a guy in a cowboy suit…with stars and a cowboy hat and a big Dobro [self-amplifying metal guitar]…There had been cowboys before there was rock ’n’ roll.”
The folk input even included a few traditional British ballads, most notably “Maggie May,” the requiem for an archetypal Liverpool “tottie,” or tart, from the well-worn hookers’ beat between Lime Street and Canning Place. John had always vaguely known the words, and was given a refresher course by his mother, playing his guitar in the living room at Mendips, watched also by Mimi and her regular boarder, Michael Fishwick. Julia knew the whole bawdy lyric that most skifflers dared not sing, and she articulated every word (“No more she’ll rob the sailor, or be fucked by many a whaler…”) with Vera Lynn clarity and sweetness. Fortunately, most of it went completely over her straitlaced sister’s head.
Otherwise, in these days when tape recorders were rare and fabulously expensive, learning the words of a song could be a laborious business. Every pop record that was released was still also published as sheet music with a one-color cover picture of the vocalist, the words spelled out in the style of operatic libretti (“You ai-n’t nu-thin’ but a ho-und dog…”) and anachronistic directions such as “Allegro” or “bright, lively rhythm.” But for a schoolboy like John, buying the record itself at six shillings per copy was costly enough. The only way to learn it was to play it over and over again, each time scribbling down another phrase, or part of one, and gaining another clue as to which chord changed into which. Since Mimi refused to have a record player at Mendips, John had to take his records to Julia’s and learn them from hers.
