Shout! (9 page)

Then, late one night over the hidden radios, a new message came. A banjo player with the Chris Barber Jazz Band had formed his own small group to record “Rock Island Line,” an American folk song dating back to the Depression, or earlier. The number was played in what jazz audiences knew already as skiffle, a style originating in the poor Southern states where people would hold rent parties to stave off the landlord, playing music on kazoos, tin cans, and other impromptu instruments. The banjoist, Tony—or “Lonnie”—Donegan, sang in a piercing pseudoblues wail, set about by elementary rhythm of which the main component was an ordinary kitchen washboard, scraped and tapped by thimble-capped fingers.

“Rock Island Line” began a national craze. For anyone could form a skiffle group simply by stealing his mother’s washboard and fixing a broom handle to a tea chest, then stringing it with wire to make a rudimentary double bass. The biggest craze of all, thanks to Elvis Presley, was for guitars. A straitlaced instrument long muffled in orchestral rhythm sections found itself suddenly the focus of all adolescent desire.

As boys pestered throughout Britain, so did John Lennon pester his aunt Mimi to buy him a guitar. Each afternoon, when Julia paid her daily visit to Menlove Avenue, she, too, would be entreated to give—even lend—him the money. For Julia, as it happened, could play the banjo a little. John’s father, Freddy, had taught her before disappearing overseas. And Freddy’s father, so he had always said, used to play professionally in America with a group of Kentucky minstrels.

It was, however, not Julia but Mimi who eventually gave in. One Saturday
morning, she put on her coat, checked the money in her purse, and told John unceremoniously to come along.

Hessy’s, the music shop in Whitechapel, central Liverpool, had an abundant stock of guitars. Frank Hessy, the owner, was sending a van regularly down to London to buy up every one to be found in the Soho street markets. Jim Gretty, his showroom manager, was selling roughly one guitar a minute from the hundreds festooned along the narrow shop wall. Jim was himself a guitarist, western-style, and each week held a beginners’ class in an upstairs room, chalking huge elementary chord-shapes on the wall.

It was Jim who sold Aunt Mimi the guitar that John said he wanted—a little Spanish model with steel strings and a label inside: “Guaranteed not to split.” “It cost me seventeen pounds, I think,” Mimi said. “I know I resented paying that, even though I’d been giving twelve pounds each for his school blazers.”

From that moment, John was—as they say in Liverpool—“lost.” Nigel Walley, calling round at Mendips, would find him up in his bedroom, oblivious to time or the first soreness of fingertip split by the steel strings. “He’d sit on his bed, just strumming,” Nigel says. “Strumming the banjo chords Julia had shown him, and singing any words that came into his head. After about ten minutes, he’d have got a tune going.”

When Mimi could no longer stand the noise, or the foot beating time through her ceiling, she would order John out of the house, into the little front porch with its walls of Art Nouveau–patterned glass. “He stood there leaning against the wall so long, I think he wore some of the brickwork away with his behind,” Mimi said. “To me, it was just so much waste of time. I used to tell him so. ‘The guitar’s all very well, John,’ I told him, ‘but you’ll never make a
living
out of it.’”

The first skiffle group he formed had only two members: himself on guitar and his crony Pete Shotton on kitchen washboard, crashing its glass ridges with thimble-capped fingers as the two of them tried out “Cumberland Gap,” “Rock Island Line,” “Don’t You Rock Me,” “Daddy-O,” and other skiffle classics. They named themselves, in roughhewn skiffle style, the Quarry Men, after the sandstone quarries dotted around Woolton, and also in unwilling recognition of the school they both attended. The school song contains a reference to “Quarry men old
before our birth”—a sentiment chorused lustily by John and Pete, since it invariably figured in the final assembly of term.

The Quarry Men grew in the image of the gang that had formerly terrorized St. Peter’s Sunday school. Nigel Walley, now a Bluecoat Grammar School boy, and Ivan Vaughan, from the Liverpool Institute, divided the role of tea-chest bass player amicably between them. Nigel’s first Teddy-Boy clothes had been seized by his policeman father and thrown on the fire, so now he kept all his choicer garments down the road at Ivan’s house. Each played bass with the Quarry Men when the other could not be bothered.

Quarry Bank High School supplied a further recruit in Rod Davis, the earnest, bespectacled boy in 4A whose parents had just bought him a banjo. Another Woolton boy named Eric Griffiths came in on the strength of his new guitar, and because he claimed to know someone on King’s Drive who owned a full-size set of drums. He took the others to meet Colin Hanton, an apprentice upholsterer who had just begun installment plan payments on a thirty-eight-pound set from Hessy’s. Colin was two years older than the others but, as he was extremely small, it didn’t matter. He was so small, he carried his birth certificate in his pocket to prove to suspicious pub landlords that he was old enough to be served with beer.

In the group, as in the gang, John was the undisputed leader. His plaid shirt collar turned up, Teddy Boy style, scowling like Elvis, he monopolized the foreground and the microphone, if there chanced to be one. “He always used to beat hell out of his guitar,” Rod Davis says. “He’d always be busting a string. Then he’d hand his guitar to me, take my banjo, and carry on on that while I knelt down in the background and tried to fix the string.

“We did all the skiffle numbers that Lonnie Donegan recorded. Right from the start, John wanted to play rock ’n’ roll as well; I can remember him singing “Blue Suede Shoes.” I’d got some Burl Ives records, so we did “Worried Man Blues.” The only way you could learn the words was by listening to the radio—or buying the record. Records were six bob (30p) each, and none of us could afford that. So John always used to make up his own words to the songs that were popular. “Long, black train” was one of them. Another one went “Come, go with me, down to the Penitentiar-ee.” They weren’t any worse than the words you were supposed to sing.”

Skiffle contests were happening all over Liverpool, at ballrooms like the Rialto and the Locarno as a cheap way of filling the intervals. In ten minutes between regular band spots three or four groups would hurry onstage and patter out their brief, invariable repertoire. The Quarry Men entered numerous such competitions, without notable success. One of the groups that continually beat them had as its chief attraction a midget named Nicky Cuff, who actually stood on the tea-chest bass while plucking at it.

Rod Davis’s father had a big old Austin Hereford car in which he would occasionally chauffeur them to a skiffle contest. For most of the time, they traveled on buses, with tea chest, drum set, and all.

On Saturday afternoons they met to practice at Colin Hanton’s house since his father, a Co-op shop manager, was guaranteed to be absent. Least practicing of all was done at Mimi’s, for the boys were somewhat in awe of her sharp tongue. Instead, they would go to Julia’s house, where they were always certain of a welcome and a laugh. Sometimes Julia would take Rod’s banjo and demonstrate chords and little runs for John and Eric Griffiths to copy on their guitars. Both as a result learned to play in banjo style, leaving the two bass strings untuned. “We used to practice standing in the bath at Julia’s,” Rod Davis says. “You could get more of an echo that way.”

In 1956, a new headmaster, William Edward Pobjoy, took charge of Quarry Bank High School. At thirty-five, he was young for such a post, and seemed younger with his boyish quiff of hair and quiet, sardonic manner. Since the new head resorted neither to shouting nor sarcasm, the Quarry Bank heavies believed they were in for an easy time.

Among the information passed on by his predecessor to Mr. Pobjoy was that John Lennon and Pete Shotton were the school’s leading criminals. “I was told there was even one master whom they not only used to terrorize, but whom Lennon had actually thumped. The poor man was so ashamed, he begged for the matter not to be reported.”

Mr. Pobjoy, in his unobtrusive way, seems to have got the measure of Lennon and Shotton. The punishment book shows that John was caned by him only once. On another occasion, he and Pete were each suspended for a week.

Mr. Pobjoy, they discovered with some astonishment, did not disapprove of skiffle. Nor did he try, on the strength of their other crimes, to stamp out the Quarry Men. He encouraged them to do anything more
positive than smoking and slacking. Now when John entered the headmaster’s office—the timber merchant’s circular book room, with finely inlaid shelves, where he had been caned so many times—it would not be defiantly, as before, but to ask Mr. Pobjoy, in all humility, if the Quarry Men could play for ten minutes during the interval at the sixth form dance.

Another source of engagements was St. Peter’s parish church, Woolton. John had sung in its choir and disrupted its Sunday school, and he and Pete Shotton still belonged to its youth club, which met in the hall across the road for badminton and ping-pong. The Quarry Men would play at the youth club “hops,” unpaid and glad of an opportunity to use a stage, and experience acoustics larger than those of John’s mother’s bathroom. When John broke a guitar string he was reimbursed from church funds.

The group existed on the most casual basis, expanding and shrinking according to members available. Already there was some dissent between Rod Davis, who wished to play pure folk music, and John with his passion for Elvis. Pete Shotton was in it only for laughs, as he strove to make clear on all occasions. Little Colin Hanton, drumming irregularly, with his birth certificate in his top pocket, was more interested in pubs and pints of Black Velvet. Fights sometimes broke out between the musicians as they were performing, or with members of the audience whose criticisms were untactfully voiced. Fights broke out also if a spectator believed a Quarry Man to be ogling his girlfriend, and clambered up among them to take revenge. John Lennon, for some reason, was always the principal target of such attacks, and was seldom averse to using his fists. “Except if it was a
really
big bloke,” Nigel Walley says. “Then John’d be as meek as a mouse. He’d always manage to talk his way out.”

“There were these two particular big Teds,” Rod Davis says. “Rod and Willo their names were. They were the terror of Woolton. Rod and Willo were always looking for us and threatening to do us over. One night when we got off the bus—with all our gear, and the tea chest as well—Rod and Willo were there, waiting for us. They came chasing after us in their long coats, and we scattered. I know we left the tea chest behind on the pavement.”

The tea chest, which Rod’s mum had covered with wallpaper, remained a prominent feature of Woolton village for about a week afterward.
Sometimes it would be standing on the pavement; sometimes it would have migrated to the middle of the road.

The role of bass player was transferred after this to Len Garry, another Liverpool Institute boy whom Ivan Vaughan had introduced into the Lennon circle. Nigel Walley, whose consuming interest was golf not skiffle, assumed the duties of manager. With his sun-tanned complexion and shining white teeth, “Walloggs” was amply suited to a diplomatic role. He took bookings for the Quarry Men and prevailed on local shopkeepers to put advertisements in their windows for no fee. He gave out formal visiting cards that read:

Country. Western. Rock ’n’ Roll. Skiffle

The Quarry Men

OPEN FOR ENGAGEMENTS

Summer was just beginning when the Quarry Men played at an open-air party in Rosebery Street. A printer friend of Colin Hanton, who had designed the label on their bass drum, was helping to organize festivities to celebrate Liverpool’s 750th anniversary as a city. Though the engagement lay some distance from Woolton—and in a rough district of Liverpool 8—it was welcomed for the beer it promised, and the girls. The Quarry Men played standing on the tailgate of a truck, which had to be moved because somebody was ill in the bedroom above. They played in the afternoon, then again in the evening, after strings of colored bulbs had come alight on the back-to-back houses.

Colin Hanton had, as usual, preceded the engagement by going to a pub, producing his birth certificate, and downing several pints of Black Velvet. By himself at the end of the trailer, he played his drums in happy disregard for what John and Eric Griffiths were singing. Pete Shotton, cradling his washboard, wore a long jacket, draped against his bony frame. Rod Davis, on banjo, looked serious, as always.

“I suddenly heard these two blokes talking, next to the trailer,” Colin Hanton says. “‘Let’s get that Lennon,’ they said. I told John, and we all jumped off the back of the wagon and ran into my mate’s house: the printer. His mum sat us down and gave us all salad. These blokes that were after us stayed outside, shouting and thumping on the windows. I’d met a girl at the party, so I took my drums and stayed the night at
her house. The other lads had to have a policeman to see them to the bus stop.”

In Paul McCartney’s home, there had always been music. His father, Jim, never tired of recalling those happy prewar days when he had led his own little group, the Jim Mac Jazz Band. The McCartneys still had what all families once used to—a piano in the living room. Jim had bought it long ago, when money was easier, from the North End Music Stores on Walton Road. Whenever he had a spare moment—which was not very often—he would move the piled-up newspapers off a chair, sit down at the piano, open its lid, and play. He liked the old tunes, like “Charmaine” and “Ramona” and, his favorite of all, “Stairway to Paradise.”

Jim’s recovery had been marvelous to see. It was as if Mary’s quiet competence had somehow been handed on to him. From the engulfing anguish following her death he had suddenly clicked into a calm resolution that for Paul’s sake and for young Michael’s home life must go on.