The Beatles (31 page)

At the end of the term, no doubt in response to his persistent truancy, George received a particularly dismal report showing how
he’d “failed everything
”—art, language, literature, math, science, even phys. ed.; attached to the bottom was a scathing rebuke by the headmaster that said: “
It is very difficult
to give an assessment of this boy’s work—because he hasn’t done any.” If the comment was intended as a wake-up call, it failed. George was already thin-skinned and intellectually insecure; nothing rankled him more than authority. He was especially infuriated by criticism from a teacher—“
some old fellow chundering on
”—and in retaliation he quit school.

Arthur Kelly says, “
His parents were fairly easygoing
about it”; however, it is reasonable to assume his father’s profound disappointment. Using Louise to run interference, George bumped aimlessly around the neighborhood each day, hoping to stumble into a trade. “At that stage, he didn’t have any idea what he wanted to do with his life,” says Kelly, who remained a close friend. Everyone weighed in with a suggestion, one more implausible than the next. Days stretched into months. Eventually, at Harry’s insistence, George took the city’s apprentice exam but failed. Soon afterward, a youth employment officer referred him to a window-dressing job at Blackler’s, one of Liverpool’s thriving department stores, which led to an apprenticeship there, at a salary of £1.50 a week. The job came as a relief, but having entered the workforce, it became impossible for George to spend his lunch hour singing.

Only rarely that fall was the band able to do something meaningful together. With their boycotting of the Casbah, few gigs provided much of a satisfying audience, or adequate money. A handful of competitions became the band’s lifeline, keeping them in front of a crowd, but they were
simply going through the motions; there was nothing of substance to be gained from those opportunities.

Determined to break cleanly with the past, they entered the
Star Search
competition as Johnny and the Moondogs. Most likely they appropriated the name from Alan Freed, whose early radio broadcasts on WJW went out in syndication as
The Moondog Show.
It may also have been one of those spur-of-the-moment inspirations that took shape on the registration form. Either way, it was characteristic, just odd enough, combining the right touch of goon humor and irreverence necessary to rattle the traditionalists. “Moondogs,” like “Beatles,” was a bit playful, a bit absurd. It could go anywhere and not seem out of the groove.

Johnny and the Moondogs performed at the Empire on October 18, the second Sunday of the auditions. The band, “
singing brilliantly
,” qualified for the local finals in two weeks’ time and, following a weeklong elimination, snared a berth at the runoff in Manchester. A larger number of acts than expected had turned out at the Manchester Hippodrome on November 15, 1959. Registration was a daylong process. “
We got there in the morning
,” says Ray Ennis, of the Swinging Bluegenes, “and there was a queue right around the whole place. Hundreds of kids, dragging instruments and amps. It was four o’clock before we got inside the front door.”

Johnny and the Moondogs took the train from Liverpool, arriving with a small entourage of friends in the nick of time for rehearsals. “Everyone hung around backstage until the audience was admitted,” recalls Arthur Kelly. “Then we all went out front in order to whistle and applaud as loud as we could so the Clap-o-Meter would hit a certain level.” The band performed a delightful rendition of Buddy Holly’s “Think It Over,” with John handling the vocal in front of Paul and George’s nicely tapered harmonies, and as they came offstage to rousing applause there was a feeling that they could win the top prize. It all depended on the finale, when each act was reintroduced for a deciding round of applause.

But as the show wore on, time weighed in against them. With the introduction of each new act, John’s eyes searched out a clock over the stagehands’ lit console, nervously noting the hour. The last bus and train left for Liverpool at 9:47; they had to make it or face being stranded in Manchester with less than a pound between them, which was out of the question.

At 9:20 there were still more than a dozen acts set to go on, too many to permit a reappearance. No question about it, time had run out. Their chance for a TV spot was over. As John, Paul, and George stalked out, followed by two or three long-faced friends, there was a lot of bitter
grumbling, although John was unusually subdued. As they were going out the stage door, where various instruments had been stacked, John suddenly veered off from the pack. “He’d had his eye on the guitars other [performers] had left there,” Kelly says, “and as we hit the exit, he just picked up a little electric cutaway number and out he went.”

After two years bashing around that “
old tatty piece of junk
,” John Lennon finally had his first electric guitar—“nicked,” he later said, “so the trip wasn’t a total loss.”

As 1959 drew to a close, the boys spent more time with girlfriends than with one another. John and Cynthia, according to friends closest to the couple, were “
besotted with each other
.” For his part, Paul stopped playing the field and settled down with Dot Rhone. As a couple, they had an appealingly unthreatening air. They discovered each other to be solicitous and sensual, gentle and clumsy, with Paul at times taking on a paternal and sympathetic role. Once, at a friend’s house, Dot happened to mention that she’d been standing all day and he began to massage her feet, stroking them as though they were precious pets. And yet, at the time the gesture felt almost preposterous.

Eventually Paul’s attention grew relentless, almost disparaging. His simple gregariousness turned uncompromising and willful. Paul was immensely charming, but there was a darker side. He had a need—Dot believes a compulsion—to control every situation. As John had done with Cynthia, he began to pick out her clothes, redesign her makeup. Dot remembers how much it pleased Paul to stand beside her and study her appearance, then, in a roundabout way, critique the way she looked—and suggest how to improve upon it. On one occasion, he insisted that she have her hair done and produced money to pay for it. Not wanting to displease him, Dot went off to the beauty parlor. “Unfortunately, they did [my hair] in a terrible-looking beehive,” she says. “
Paul was furious
when he saw it. He told me to go home and not to call him until it grew out again.”

She detected other changes in Paul that proved equally disagreeable. He had an almost stuffy, explosive air of self-importance, with his simple superiority, cool poise, and weatherproof rightness. He scorned any sign of self-confidence in her. And Dot, pricked by love, submitted. As a rule, she did not impose her will on him, certainly never when they were among friends. She would sit quietly and smile tensely for entire evenings at the Jacaranda while Paul and John discussed music. If Paul glared, she would
freeze like a rabbit. “We weren’t allowed to open our mouths,” Dot says of her and Cynthia’s attendance at these nightly discussions. “They’d talk all night, and we just listened.”

One day, just before the end of the year, John announced that Stuart Sutcliffe was moving into a spacious student flat near school, where they’d have plenty of room to rehearse. Without delay, everyone decided to meet over there and check it out.

Stuart’s flat was on the first floor of a Georgian-style town house called
Hillary Mansions
, located directly catercorner to the art college at 3 Gambier Terrace. When the guys walked in, they found a strikingly familiar student layout: a warren of sparsely furnished rooms, two “bohemian” girls—Diz Morris and Margaret Duxburry, who had moved in to help shoulder the “
ridiculously expensive
” £3-a-week rent—a revolving-door cast of visitors, and enough disarray to reinforce its reputation as a crash pad. But whereas Stuart’s previous flat had been a cramped one-room affair, this place was rambling: a huge high-ceilinged living room warmed by a fireplace faced the front, along with a smaller bedroom, which the two girls quickly claimed. At the end of a long corridor was the kitchen, a bathroom, and an enormous back room with two walk-in closets. “Stuart had the big back room,” said Rod Murray, “and we put all the easels in there.” A gallery of paintings went up on the walls.

John, Paul, and George started playing in the back room almost from the day Stuart moved in. They met there each evening, after Blackler’s closed, and lit into two dozen or more songs culled from an expanding repertoire of current hits. No one remembers them working on originals, although it is likely that a few were sprinkled in the mix. Nevertheless, they touched off a festive atmosphere each night, as friends poured into the flat to listen and dance. To many, it was “like a never-ending party,” but almost immediately “we got complaints from above and below,” Rod Murray recalled.

By then, John had more or less moved into Gambier Terrace, sharing the back room with Stuart, who was happy for the company. Although John had shown little interest in literature while at Quarry Bank, he tore greedily through Stuart’s books, including
Lucretius’s
On the Nature of the Universe,
one of the titles with cachet that Stuart had thrust at him rather daringly one night, with the challenge to “expand his Scouser mind.”

John was doing more than expanding his mind. By the end of 1959, it was evident to him that if the band were to be elevated in any meaningful
way, they’d need to make adjustments. Without a bass and drums, it just wasn’t rock ’n roll. They needed to revamp—or forget the whole thing.

Sometime right after Christmas, he and Stuart were meandering through the frost-rimed
cemetery in the Anglican cathedral
, directly across the street from Gambier Terrace. It was a favorite haunt of theirs; the boys spent hours, sometimes entire afternoons, walking around the windy, saucer-shaped slopes that hemmed the church near the front courtyard. They could see the glinting dome of the Royal Insurance Company Building in the distance, and beyond it the brooding Mersey, with a queue of boats trawling the Narrows channel.

Ordinarily, John loved to peruse the sooty headstones half-buried in the spongy ground. No matter how many he examined, there were untold more to keep him entertained. But this day, he seemed distracted. While Stuart crouched by an overgrown plot, John stared off into the landscape. Finally, haltingly, he said, “
Now [that] you’ve got all this money
, Stu, you can buy a [bass] and join our group.”

It was a calculated risk in more ways than one. He certainly didn’t want Stuart to feel taken advantage of. And there was a greater harmony to consider. Would he fit in with Paul and George? The fellows all got along well—as friends. That simplified their social lives, but bands had a personality all their own and required communication of an entirely different kind. Painting was one thing, but rhythm? Could Stuart pick up the beat or carry a tune? For that matter, would he be able to learn how to play the instrument? These were all questions that John had no answers to.

But Stuart took only a long moment to mull it over before responding to John’s offer. “Stuart thought it was a wonderful idea,” his sister Pauline remembered. “If anything, it was the image, not the music, that was attractive to him. He liked the whole [concept] of pop and Buddy Holly and Elvis—how they looked.” Years before aesthetics became the cornerstone of rock ’n roll, Stuart knew that image was everything. As for the bass, Stuart decided it’d be relatively easy to learn. His mother had insisted on piano lessons, which he’d taken scrupulously since the age of nine. There was the bugle that he’d played in the Air Training Corps. And his father had “taught him a few chords on [the] guitar.” The hardest part about the bass, he figured, was getting hold of one.

As it turned out, that was the least of his problems. He found a sunburst Hofner President at Hessy’s Music Store that filled the bill nicely. Stories about how he turned over the entire Moores commission in exchange for the
bass are legion.
According to one version, his father
found the guitar while snooping around Stuart’s room and pitched a fit about its price.
In fact, using a bit of creative financing
, a monthly purchase plan was worked out with Frank Hesselberg so that only a modest £5 deposit snared him the bass.

Stuart may well have been the natural choice, but his decision to play music perplexed his fellow artists. Bill Harry, for one, remembers the irritation he felt when Stuart flashed the new bass as though exhibiting a finished oil painting. “I said to him, ‘
What the bloody hell
are you doing?’ ” Harry recalls. “ ‘You’re passionate about
art,
not music!’ ” Stuart shook off such concern with bemused disregard. To Harry’s objection, he responded soothingly: “No, it’s all right. I think it’s art.” He had decided to dedicate himself to the band with “as much seriousness and intensity” as he approached painting. “And anyway,” Stuart told him, “they’re going to be the greatest. I want to be a part of it.”