Paul McCartney (8 page)

But there was no going back. Thanks to Elvis, and the Teds, British boys en masse had discovered something previously unknown in their stodgy, sleepy country, except to a tiny metropolitan elite. They had discovered style. So Paul joined the queue at Bioletti’s barber shop, beside the Penny Lane roundabout, waiting for his former boyish tousle to be shaped into a toppling Elvis quiff and combed back at the sides into the two interwoven rear flaps known as a ‘duck’s arse’, or DA. Unfortunately, like many another 14-year-old would-be Elvis, he spent his weekdays in a school uniform whose cap was designed to be worn squarely on the head, to the ruination of any coiffure let alone this springy, aerated one.

The Institute had a strict dress code, personally enforced by its headmaster, J. R. Edwards, popularly known as ‘the Baz’ (short for ‘bastard’). Nowhere was he more of a baz than over caps, which had to be worn at all times on pain of severe punishment. The only way Paul could do so without harming the precious cockade was to clamp his cap onto the back of his head like a Jewish yarmulka.

Grammar school boys, too, now craved the Teds’ drainpipe trousers that British parents hated almost as much as they did rock ‘n’ roll music. Even the easy-going Jim could not abide ‘drainies’ and insisted Paul’s dark grey school trousers should retain their billowy 24-inch cuffs (although in Jim’s own pre-Great War boyhood, every Englishman from the prime minister downwards had been slim-shanked).

Other boys were having furious arguments with their fathers on the subject–but not Paul. Few men’s outfitters yet sold tapered trousers ready to wear; the usual thing was for an alterations tailor to ‘take in’ a conventional baggy pair. Paul had his school ones taken in a little at a time, first to 20 inches, then 18, then 16, so that Jim wouldn’t notice the erosion.

He found other ways of taking in his dad as well, without ever actually lying. ‘Near my house there was a tailor who’d do the job while you waited,’ Ian James remembers. ‘Paul used to leave for school wearing ordinary-width trousers, then have them altered at lunch-time. If Jim said anything about them when he got home, he’d say, “They’re the same pair you saw me go out in this morning.”’

Most days on his bus journey to school, Paul sat next to a fellow Institute pupil, a pale, solemn-looking boy named George Harrison who lived in Upton Green, Speke, not far from the McCartneys’ former home in Ardwick Road, and whose father, Harry, worked as a bus-driver for Liverpool Corporation. Often, when the number 86 stopped on Mather Avenue to pick up Paul, Mr Harrison would be behind the wheel, so he’d get a free ride.

George was a year his junior and in the class below his at the Inny, so during the day there was a wide social gap between them. But on the journey to and from school they could be friends. Paul was much impressed by an episode illustrative of their very different families. After some misdemeanour, George had received the Inny’s commonest corporal punishment, one or more strokes on the palm of the hand with a wooden ruler. ‘The teacher missed his hand and caught him on the wrist, and made a big red weal. The next day, his dad came to the school and punched the teacher on the nose. If I’d complained to my dad that I’d been beaten, he’d have said, “You probably deserved it.”’

After ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ came out, much of Paul and George’s conversation revolved around Elvis–his astounding voice, his amazing clothes, the guitar that seemed his indispensable accomplice in whipping up female frenzy. George revealed that his bus-driving dad had learned to play the guitar while serving in the Merchant Navy and that he himself now possessed one. Paul in return made the rather less sensational announcement that he was learning the trumpet.

Out of school hours, his main friend continued to be Ian James. They were both good-looking, and both equally obsessed by their hair and clothes. Among the new records currently on Radio Luxembourg was ‘A White Sport Coat’, by the American country singer Marty Robbins (anglicised into ‘A White Sports Coat’ by Britain’s King Brothers). Paul had searched high and low for such a garment and finally found one in silver-flecked oatmeal, cut in daring Teddy boy ‘drape’ style with a flap on its breast pocket. Ian had a similar Elvis quiff and DA and a similar jacket in pale blue.

He also had access to a guitar just at this moment when the eyes of British boys were becoming riveted to the instrument. His grandfather had been bandmaster to the local Salvation Army in the Dingle and he’d grown up with a Spanish guitar around the house–then considered nothing but a background rhythm-maker. When the skiffle craze arrived, and Paul finally got a guitar of his own, Ian looked like his natural musical partner.

Skiffle derived from American folk music during the Great Depression when poor whites who couldn’t afford conventional instruments would improvise them from kitchen washboards, jugs, and kazoos. In its British reincarnation, it became a mash-up of blues, country, folk, jazz and spirituals–all genres about which most young Britons had little or no previous knowledge.

Its biggest, in fact only, star was Lonnie Donegan–like Paul, of mixed Irish and Scots origins–who had previously played banjo with Chris Barber’s jazz band. In 1956, Donegan and a rhythm section from the Barber band recorded a skiffle version of ‘Rock Island Line’ by the blues giant (and convicted killer) Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter. Its subject matter, railroad-tolls on Rock Island, Illinois, could hardly have been more mundane, but that word ‘rock’, in any context, now set schoolboy hormones aflame. ‘Rock Island Line’ went to number eight in Britain and also became a hit across the Atlantic, an unprecedented example of British musicians selling Americana back to the Americans.

Skiffle offered the romance of America–chiefly represented by freight trains, penitentiaries and chain-gangs–but without the taint of sex and Teddy boy violence attached to rock ‘n’ roll. The BBC relented so far as to put on a radio programme called Saturday Skiffle Club and an early-evening TV show especially for teenagers titled like a train, the Six-Five Special, with skiffle theme music. Whereas rock ‘n’ roll was an unknowable alchemy created by incomprehensible beings, skiffle could be played by anyone with a cheap acoustic guitar and mastery of the three simple chords of 12-bar blues. Its other essential instruments were literally home-made: ‘basses’ improvised from resonant empty boxes, broom-handles and bits of string, and serrated kitchen washboards, scrubbed with fingers capped by steel thimbles to create a scratchy, frenetic percussion.

The effect was galvanising on bashful British boys with no previous musical leanings who, hitherto, would rather have committed hara-kiri than get up in public and sing. All over the country, juvenile skiffle groups sprang–or, rather, strummed–into life under exotically homespun names, like the Vipers, the Nomads, the Hobos, the Streamliners and the Sapphires. The guitar rocketed even further in popularity, so much so that at one point a national shortage was declared.

In November 1956, when Lonnie Donegan appeared at Liverpool’s Empire Theatre, Paul was in the audience. Before the show, he hung around the Empire stage-door, hoping for a glimpse of Donegan arriving for rehearsal. Some local factory hands had sneaked out of work with the same idea; Donegan paused to talk to them and on learning they’d gone AWOL he wrote a note to their foreman, asking that they shouldn’t be penalised because of him. Paul had expected metaphorical stars to be as cold and distant as the real thing, and Donegan’s friendliness and graciousness to those fans made a profound impression on him.

By now, the ‘King of Skiffle’ had dropped all 1930s-hobo visuals from his act, performing the ragged-arsed repertoire of Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie in black tie, with a tuxedoed trio that included a virtuoso electric guitarist, Denny Wright. That touch of sophistication was Paul’s Damascene moment; from then on, he burned to play a guitar and sing–an impossibility with a trumpet. So after the Donegan show, he asked his dad if he could swap his birthday present for a guitar. To Jim McCartney, as to all musicians of his generation, rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle were undifferentiated cacophony. But, remembering how his own dad, the brass band E-flat tuba man, had once ridiculed his love of jazz and swing, he resolved to be tolerant. So Paul returned the trumpet to Rushworth and Draper’s music store and in its place selected a Zenith acoustic guitar with f-holes and a red sunburst finish, price £15.

For instruction he turned to Ian James, who now owned a superior Rex model with a cutaway body, for reaching the tinkliest treble notes at the bottom of the fretboard. Ian showed him the first basic one-finger chords, G and G7, and how to tune the Zenith–which, with his natural musical ear, presented no problem. To begin with he played as Ian did, with his guitar-neck pointing leftwards, but found it extremely awkward and laborious. Then he happened to see a picture of the American country star Slim Whitman, a ‘leftie’ like himself, and realised he should be holding his guitar the other way around, fingering the fretboard with his right hand and strumming with his left. That, of course, put the bottom string where the top one ought to be, so he had to remove all six and put them into reverse order. The white scratch plate–over which the strummer’s hand slides after each stroke–proved too firmly screwed in place to be switched over, so it had to be left upside-down.

All this was less than a month after Mary’s death. And for Paul, in his buttoned-up grief, the Zenith came as salvation with six strings. He played it at every possible moment, even when sitting on the toilet, both the inside and outside ones. ‘It became an obsession… took over his whole life,’ remembers Mike McCartney. ‘It came along at just the right moment and became his escape.’

He also began to sing as he played, not mimicking Elvis or Little Richard now, but in his real voice. This was high and pure, like no one currently in the charts or anywhere in popular music except perhaps the jazz singer Mel Tormé, though he found he could give it a sandpapery rock ‘n’ roll edge.

And he’d already written–or, as his dad would say, made up–a song. Called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, it seemed to be in the usual idiom of teenage heartbreak, but actually was a way of channelling his grief over his mother’s death. It revolved around chords Ian James had taught him, G, G7 and C, and Ian was one of the first people he played it to, in his bedroom at Forthlin Road. ‘I was really impressed,’ James remembers. ‘I’d always thought all songwriters were old blokes on Tin Pan Alley. That was something no one else I knew would have thought of doing.’

Despite his obsession with his guitar, he kept up his interest in the piano, now suddenly the least cool of instruments. He had often asked his father to teach him, but Jim, modest and self-deprecating as ever, insisted he could only learn ‘properly’ by finding a teacher and going through all the groundwork he had shirked as a small boy. Remembering the camphor-scented old lady teachers he’d so disliked then, Paul made sure he had lessons from a man this time, and started on a back-to-basics course, determined to be able to read music at the end of it. But he felt no more interested now than he had at the age of eight–and, meantime, songs kept coming into his mind for which he could always find the piano-chords by instinct. ‘Something was making me make it up,’ he would recall, ‘whether I knew how to do it or not.’

Rock ‘n’ roll films, too, were now coming from America and finding their way to Merseyside cinemas. They were a genre known as ‘exploitation movies’, hastily put out to catch the craze before its universally-predicted demise. Most were cheap black and white affairs, with feeble plots and cliché characters, serving only as a showcase for the music acts involved. But The Girl Can’t Help It, filmed in colour and CinemaScope and on general release all over Britain in the summer of 1957, was like no exploitation movie before.

Intended primarily as a vehicle for the monumentally-endowed Jayne Mansfield, it was a satire on rock ‘n’ roll, with in-performance appearances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters and Freddie Bell and the Bell Boys. It had all the sexiness for which the music was condemned, but wrapped in witty double entendre, verbal and visual, that went completely over the censors’ heads. In its most famous scene, Little Richard shrieked the title song in voice-over as Mansfield sashayed down a street, making men’s spectacles shatter in their frames and milk spurt orgasmically from bottles.

The film’s performance sequences included two instant rock ‘n’ roll classics. One was ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, the first rock band whose sidemen were as young and hip, in their blue ‘cheesecutter’ caps, as the lead singer. The other was ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ by Eddie Cochran, an Elvis lookalike with a white sports coat, a red guitar–and a novel line in humour and self-mockery. His girlfriend lived on the top floor, the elevator was broken, so he had to walk up 20 flights and his feet were killing him.

Paul and Ian James were among the first in line to see The Girl Can’t Help It. Afterwards, Ian bought the single of ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ from Currys in Elliott Street, playing it over and over again until he’d worked out its guitar chords and Paul had managed to decipher and write down all its words. ‘After a couple of run-throughs, he got it,’ James remembers. ‘He was Eddie Cochran.’

At the beginning of July 1957, Lonnie Donegan was in the charts yet again with a double-sided hit, ‘Gamblin’ Man’ and ‘Puttin’ On the Style’. Skiffle groups had started up all over Liverpool, but none so far had attempted to recruit Paul, and he seemed in no hurry to join one.

Two boys he knew at the Inny, Ivan Vaughan and Len Garry, were sharing the role of tea chest bassist in a group called the Quarrymen. ‘Ivy’, a formidably bright ‘A’ streamer, was his special friend: they shared the same sense of humour and the same birthday, 18 June. And it so happened that Ivan’s home in Vale Road, Woolton, backed on to that of the Quarrymen’s leader, John Lennon, with whom he was equally good friends.

On 6 July, the Quarrymen were to play at a garden fete organised by Woolton’s parish church, St Peter’s. Ivan suggested Paul should come along and he’d introduce him to John with a view to his possibly joining the line-up. Paul agreed, but asked Ian James to meet him there, thinking there might be places for both of them in the group–and also for a bit of protection.