John Lennon: The Life (40 page)

In a skillful damage-control move, Tony Barrow did not try to suppress the story but instead fed a damped-down version of it to a friendly Fleet Street contact, the
Sunday Mirror
’s pop columnist, Don Short. Under the headline
BEATLE IN BRAWL—SORRY I SOCKED YOU
, Short obligingly wrote a story of anguished remorse: “Guitarist John Lennon…leader of the Beatles pop group said last night ‘Why did I have to go and punch my best friend? I was so high [drunk], I didn’t realise what I was doing…. Bob is the last person in the world I would want to have a fight with. I can only hope he realises that I was too far gone to know what I was doing….’” No other paper bothered to investigate the story, no eyebrow even twitched at the BBC, and in a few days, amazingly, the whole affair had blown over.

“I had to agree John’s quotes with him before I dictated them over the phone to Don Short,” Barrow remembers. “He was muttering that he wasn’t sorry at all, that he hadn’t really been all that pissed, and that Bob deserved it.” Groveling apologies against his will, for the general good, were something he would have to get used to.

I
n the midsummer of 1963, John was just another successful British pop musician among many. Within barely a year, he had become one of the four best-known faces on earth.

No strides to the front rank of fame—and then dizzyingly beyond it—were ever so quick or seemingly effortless. On October 13, the Beatles topped the bill in Britain’s most prestigious TV variety show,
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, and the condition known as Beatlemania entered the national vocabulary. On October 31, returning from a Swedish tour, they caused their first mob scenes at London Heathrow Airport. On November 4, at the Prince of Wales theater, they were the hit of the Royal Variety Show, captivating the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret and upstaging a galaxy of international talent, including Marlene Dietrich and Sophie Tucker. Two months later, America fell; by the year’s end, they had mopped up the rest of the world.

Where Britain and Europe were concerned, the springboard was their fourth single, “She Loves You,” released on August 23, which became their third consecutive UK number one. Ironically for a song destined to be almost inaudible in live performance, its lyric was somewhat of an experiment. Rather than the usual direct appeal of boy to girl, a well-meaning third party acted as go-between from a girl to a boy who mistakenly thought she had broken up with him. It was doubly ironic, therefore, that the tempests of female excitement were created by males singing to a
male
. The message intended to be whispered in someone’s ear was perversely pounded out at top volume, its affirming cliché-cry of “Yeah!” given brand-new spin by being brazenly uttered in triplicate. With even less conversational logic, the chorus ended in the Little Richard–ish falsetto “Ooo!” that had already been tested in the middle eight of “From Me to You.”

Though the song was full of recognizable Lennonisms (for instance, the meticulous scansion of “apol-oh-gise to he-er”), John always gave Paul full credit for a story line that might not readily have occurred to him. “[Paul] would write a song about someone. I’m more inclined to write about myself.”

In any news-film miscellany of 1963, they are always there—the four little figures onstage in their knife-sharp suits and boots; the tiers of immature female faces contorted in rapture, adoration, or anguish; the screams that reach a new zenith each time the front three go “Ooo!” and shake their hair like manic feather dusters. There was, of course, hysteria on a similar scale when Frank Sinatra opened at the New York Paramount in 1942 and Elvis first shook his hips and curled his lip in 1955. Beatle-generated screams are not only louder and wilder but at a decibel level that can seem barely human, more like the squeal of navy bosuns’ pipes a million times magnified. Half joyous, half dolorous, the awesome racket never ceases from the moment the four appear until long after they disappear: an atonal, almost rhythmic “eeeee! eeeee! eeeee!” that takes no account of anything they do or say and obliterates almost every sound they make.

But unlike the transports that greeted Sinatra and Presley, Beatle screams have no sexual element. This is not the noise of adolescent femininity, torn by confused desire and frustration, but of little girls
keening over a deceased pet hamster or celebrating a brand-new teddy bear. Frank and Elvis had each performed under bombardments of scribbled telephone numbers and pairs of panties; at John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the fans throw jelly babies.

Fleetingly audible in the tearful eye of the hurricane will be John singing “Twist and Shout”—now lifted off the
Please Please Me
album to become the title track of an EP (a four-track mini-album) that reached number two in the UK singles chart. The audience has only to hear its slowed-down “La Bamba” bass riff to erupt into fresh frenzy, goaded by more hair-shaking
Ooo
’s and barnyard whoops and yelps. It is the dumbest as well as most unoriginal song the Beatles will ever perform, and John conveys his full appreciation of that fact even while giving it the same larynx-ripping intensity he did on record. “[He] must have grown leather tonsils in a throat of steel,” says Tony Barrow’s EP sleeve note, “to turn out such a violently exciting track.” Often as he sings the dippy words, celebrating the passé dance—“C’mon, twist a little closer now”—his eyes take on a stony blankness, like some marble knight lying with folded hands for eternity in the hushed transept of a cathedral.

Several factors, working in strange harmony, transformed the Beatles from a purely adolescent preoccupation to a national talking point, then a national treasure. Of no small significance was that in 1963 the immemorial grip of Britain’s upper classes finally appeared to loosen. All summer, the developing revelations of the Profumo scandal had shown those with posh accents to be just as capable of debauchery and dishonor as their basest social inferiors. Against the backdrop of randy Cabinet ministers, call girls, Russian spies, property speculators, and seedy “Society” osteopaths, the doddering complacency of Prime Minister Macmillan and his ministers, the constant smutty sniping of
That Was the Week That Was
and
Private Eye
magazine, newly chic northern honesty and plainspokenness seemed more refreshing than ever, especially when allied to youthful energy and charm. The social climate could not have been more auspicious for the Beatles to appear in the Royal Variety Show or for John’s quip, as he introduced “Twist and Shout” to the boiled-shirt-and-tiara set, to delight the whole nation: “…people in the cheap
seats, clap your hands…and the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle yer jewellery.”

Britain’s national press was at last waking up to youth culture, its growing importance to the national economy and the power of its idols to stimulate circulation. And at this exact moment, providence delivered a pop group who were not the traditional grunting Neanderthals but unprecedentedly articulate and funny, who delivered good quotes in natural profusion rather than obliging reporters to manufacture them. They were also perfect comic relief from an otherwise unremitting diet of hard and often grim news: not only the continuing fallout from the Cuban missile crisis, the Profumo scandal, and Harold Macmillan’s resignation, but also Britain’s abortive efforts to join the European Common Market, the Greville Wynne spy case, and the Great Train Robbery.

Fleet Street coined the term Beatlemania and, from late 1963 onward, had a vested interest in its perpetuation. Here we are not speaking of tabloids in the modern sense but of “popular broad-sheets,” as the
Daily Express
and
Daily Mail
both still were: Tory trumpeters with enormous readerships throughout Middle England, which had never previously needed to pay attention to anyone under twenty-one except the teenage Derby-winning jockey Lester Piggott. Back in February, the
Express
had been particularly censorious over the Beatles’ little brush with Carlisle’s Young Conservatives, dwelling on the unsavoriness of their black leather jackets as though they were reincarnated Nazi storm-troopers. Now the same paper claimed credit for first putting “Beatlemania” into a headline, as if it were the scoop of the century.

Their second album,
With the Beatles
, was as much a social milestone as a musical one. The
Please Please Me
LP cover, a straight color portrait by Angus McBean, had shown four lads manifestly from pop’s usual artisan class, grinning down over a balustrade in the stairwell at EMI House. On the cover of
With the Beatles
, those cheeky provincial interlopers were no more. Four serious, self-possessed faces cupped in high turtlenecks floated on a plain black background, each half in shadow like light and dark sides of adjacent moons. All of them, rather than just one, might have been sometime
art students, if not male models straight from the pages of
Vogue
or
Town
magazine.

Here was an LP that could be carried as a fashion accessory, and whose authentic hard-core rock and soul ingredients (Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” Barrett Strong’s “Money,” the Miracles’ “You Really Got a Hold on Me”) contrasted irresistibly with its aura of existentialist cool. From here on, the aura of proletarian vulgarity and shoddiness that Elvis and the Teddy Boys had given rock in 1955 vanished forever. Not only girls serving behind the counter at Woolworths but also girls preparing for their first London “season,” not only boys sweating over factory lathes but also boys in their studies at ancient public schools or ivy-clad Oxbridge were now with the Beatles.

The album’s release date, Friday, November 22, found the Beatles in Stockton-on-Tees, preparing for a one-nighter at the Globe Cinema. Around six p.m., a fellow musician came to their dressing room with the news, just flashed on the BBC, that President John F. Kennedy had been killed by a sniper as his motorcade passed through cheering crowds in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was an inspirational figure to the British hardly less than to his own people, not merely for facing down Russia over Cuba but for his youth and glamour and the sense of idealism and optimism he had given the new decade. John would later remember how numbed with shock all four of the Beatles were, although that night’s show still had to go ahead as planned. For the first time—but alas, not the last—America and Britain had lost a hero in common, millions on each side of the Atlantic feeling such unified grief and disbelief that they would always remember exactly where and in what circumstances they first heard the news.

Even Britain’s mourning for Kennedy cast no serious shadow on Beatlemania. A week later, the fifth Beatles single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” instantly went to number one on advance orders of a million copies, finally ending the long supremacy of “She Loves You.” The same happened in the album charts, where
With the Beatles
and
Please Please Me
stood at number one and two respectively. With these unprecedented statistics came an equally astounding critical accolade. The
Times
’s classical music critic, William Mann,
named Lennon and McCartney as “the outstanding English composers of 1963,” and commended them for having “brought a distinctive and exhilarating flavour into a genre of music that was in danger of ceasing to be music at all.”

Mann’s unsigned eight-hundred-word article created a sensation matched by few other pieces of twentieth-century criticism. Never before had the world of classical music regarded that of chart-busting pop with anything but snobbish incomprehension. It was all the more extraordinary for appearing in the “top people’s paper,” an establishment bulletin board so wedded to stuffy tradition that the front page was still covered with classified ads for domestic servants and prep schools.

The most widely quoted passages would be those where Mann gave musicological definitions to vocal and instrumental effects John and Paul had hit on by instinct or accident—the “major tonic sevenths and ninths,” the “flat submediant key-switches,” the concluding “Aeolian cadence” in “Not a Second Time,” which, so they now learned, had the same chord progression as the end of Mahler’s
Song of the Earth
. But Mann was also strangely clairvoyant—predicting the Beatles’ American conquest weeks before it was even remotely on the cards. And both his higher-tuned powers of aural perception and his command of English resulted in a far more vivid, thought-provoking critique than any pop reviewer had yet managed. He was, for instance, the first to notice the greater complexity and subtlety of Beatles B-sides than their million-selling A-sides, as if a Graham Greene–like decision had been made to separate experimentation from pure entertainment.

No analysis could have been sharper of “the…often quasi-instrumental vocal duetting, sometimes in scat or falsetto, the melismas with altered vowels (‘I saw her yesterday-ee-ay’) which have not yet become mannered, and the discreet, sometimes subtle, varieties of instrumentation—a suspicion of piano or organ, a few bars of mouth organ obbligato…the translation of African blues or American western idioms into tough, sensitive Merseyside.”

Mann, at this stage, had not met John and Paul or seen them in live performance, yet somehow understood the balance of power
between them. “How Lennon and McCartney divide their creative responsibilities I have yet to discover,” he wrote, “but it is perhaps significant that Paul is the bass guitarist of the group.”

What captivated and fascinated Britain in late 1963 was not just a pop group more extraordinarily and unstoppably successful than any before. It was the new definition of “pop group” they had created, something closer to the Marx Brothers than any forerunners like the Blue Caps or Shadows—a gang laughingly on the run from overblown adulation and desire, a brotherhood that in the brightest glare of publicity still kept its own intriguing secrets, the ultimate impenetrable clique. And within that magic circle were four individuals who might have been handpicked by central casting to appeal to every shade of temperament in their public: the clever one; the sweet, pretty one; the shy, serious one; the haplessly adorable runt of the litter.

Later eras of mindless celebrity worship and voyeuristic tabloid journalism would see nothing like the British media’s first obsession with the Beatles. Day after day came stories of their new feats in the charts and the shrieking and mobbing of their fans, and still the public clamored to know more: how barbers throughout the land were besieged by demands for Beatle cuts; how sales of toy plastic guitars and black turtleneck sweaters were booming; how, thanks to them, the nearly defunct corduroy-manufacturing industry had experienced a renaissance; how their private Liverpool slang—“fab” and “gear” for
good
, or “grotty” (a contraction of “grotesque”) for
bad
—now tripped off tongues from the salons of Mayfair to the remotest Outer Hebridean island.