The Beatles (9 page)

John threw himself into the practices, which took place daily after school, usually at Mendips or occasionally at Eric’s house on Halewood Drive. He was completely uninhibited about singing, belting out each number the way he imagined an entertainer would deliver it. But John’s was a provincial voice, hundreds of miles away from the urban toughness of his heroes. It was achingly beautiful and honest in a way that underscored its raw vulnerability, and yet the delivery was powerful—there was a clear quality of whimsy that shadowed each line he sang, a kind of half-cast vocal smirk juxtaposed with stinging emotion, as though it weren’t enough simply to sing a lyric when you could comment on it as well. “
John was a born performer
,” Griffiths says without equivocation. “You could sense that when he sang. It lifted him, he was energized [by it].”

Both boys soon grew dissatisfied with their after-school practice sessions. They were too confining; nor were they social, expressive, or theatrical enough. “We wanted to play to people,” Griffiths says. “That was our objective from the start. It didn’t matter where we performed, either, as long as we were playing in front of [an audience].” When John finally announced that it was time to assemble a band, Eric didn’t so much as blink.

There were few things that Pete Shotton put beyond his best friend, but when John invited him to join a skiffle band, he was dumbfounded. They had been walking across the field out beyond Quarry Bank High School, ruminating over some musical triviality, when John confronted him with it in much the same way he asked about dancing class. “
Should we start a band
, then, Pete?” he asked evasively. Shotton, who hadn’t a scintilla of musical ability, assumed John was making fun of him. He cursed and snapped, “I can’t be bothered!” But a trace of rejection in John’s face warned Pete that he’d misread the situation. Laughing to recover the bonhomie, Shotton said, “
Don’t be silly—I can’t play
anything.” That was all it took to revive John. Instantly, the fantasy was rekindled. “It doesn’t matter,” John said encouragingly. “You can get a tea chest [washtub] or a washboard and just have a plunk-plunk. We’ll sing our songs… like on the Bank. We can have a laugh, right? Let’s have a laugh.”

Upon hearing about the band, Pete’s mother,
Bessie, contributed a washboard
she found in the shed, along with some thimbles from her sewing gear. “Mum was very supportive of this,” he recalls, despite the fact that she considered “cheeky” John Lennon to be a “bad influence on her beloved son. She liked the fact we were doing something constructive… and the idea of her son [being] in a band was thrilling [to her].”

But Pete secretly loathed the undertaking. While he shared John’s love of music and the package it came wrapped in, he “absolutely hated” the idea of participating in a band. For one thing, he was shy in front of strangers, mortified by having to stand up in public and sing, “playing this silly piece of tin.” That he wasn’t musical caused him to feel humiliated in front of his more talented friends; strafed by this insecurity, he was convinced, albeit wrongly, that it diminished him in their eyes. But he was John’s best mate, determined to give his friend what Mimi had thus far refused to provide: encouragement, even at the expense of his own displeasure.

Shotton, in turn, persuaded another classmate and neighbor, Bill Smith, to throw in with them. Smith, like Pete, had no musical experience, which didn’t detract from his eligibility; what he had was an old washtub that proved expendable and was thereby coveted by the band. By attaching a broomstick-and-rope getup to it, one could simulate a bass sound merely by leaning one way or the other, adjusting the rope’s tension and plucking. Truthfully, it made no difference what note was played as long as the constant thumping provided some grave, resonant bottom—a trick that Smith, or just about anybody, could pull off.

Meanwhile, Eric Griffiths recruited Rod Davis to play banjo. The instrument was an oddity—a five-string Windsor model, unusual because it replaced the standard extra peg on the neck with a brass tube that conveyed the fifth string from the neck to the machine head, but for £5 there had been no reason for Davis to pass it up. “
I took it to school
[that] Monday,” Davis recalls, and encountering Eric Griffiths, he exclaimed, “Eric, I got a banjo yesterday.” Griffiths, who was eager to get the band under way, seized the opportunity. “Oh,” he said, “do you want to be in a group?” Davis was caught off guard, not only by the invitation but by Griffith’s apparent lack of interest in whether he could even play the banjo. Davis reminded his friend that he couldn’t so much as finger a chord. Griffiths assured him that it wouldn’t be a problem.

“Count me in,” he eventually told Griffiths, and made plans to attend a practice after school, at Pete Shotton’s house.

There were too many boys to assemble inside the Shottons’ house on Vale Road, so Pete’s mother sent them out back, to the garden, where an old corrugated-iron bomb shelter, exposed on one whole side, stood abandoned in the leaves. It was bitter cold in the yard, not for the fainthearted, and the four boys, bundled in sweaters, huddled under the damp metal shell with its reflected light pooled between them, hugging their shoulders and rubbing red, chafed hands in an effort to recharge their circulation.

Right away, Lennon took control
of things, telling everyone where to stand, how to act, what to play—and when. There was a flow and an authority in the way he spoke that kept the others in thrall. “
I remember being very impressed
that John had all this in his head,” says Nigel Walley, another childhood friend, who lived in a semi-detached house called Leosdene on Vale Road, halfway between Ivan Vaughan and Pete Shotton, and had stopped by “to see what all the fuss was about.” Since few of the boys had ever had the chance to actually see a skiffle band in action, they were obliged by John’s special knowledge, unaware that his know-how was for the most part intuitive. “He just
knew
what to do, it was right at his fingertips,” Walley says. “It wasn’t this concept he’d worked out; it came naturally to him. The amazing thing, too, was how effortlessly he got everyone else to follow him.”

The first song they attempted to play was “Rock Island Line” (John had bought a copy of the Donegan single from old Mrs. Roberts, who owned the village record shop, opposite the baths), with John naturally taking the lead. There was never any discussion about who should sing. With his pale face lifted to the light, John barreled through the song, while his befuddled sidemen did everything they could to stay with him. Chords were jumbled unintelligibly, each instrument reeling in its own orbit. They looked clumsy, crowded under the little metal canopy, with everyone flailing away at the strings. All the boys would later agree that the sound was an unadulterated mess, but at the time no one gave it a second thought. The thrill of playing a song together—
as a band!
—overshadowed their ineptitude. They grinned at one another’s beaming faces, proud and lit from within. By the end of the day, they had plowed through four folk songs, if not with measurable accomplishment, then at least brimming with determination.

Almost as vital as the music was choosing a name for the band. No one is certain who proposed calling them the Blackjacks, but it was approved unanimously and with a measure of deservedness. Eric Griffiths says, “It
had the right sound for boys our age—rugged, dark, and American. We tried it on for size, and it just fit like a glove.”

Successive after-school practices produced a solid, if unpolished, set of songs. The Blackjacks learned the entire Donegan songbook, including “Wabash Cannonball,” “Dead or Alive,” “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie,” “John Henry,” “Midnight Special,” “Cumberland Gap,” and “Worried Man Blues.” Even though John sang lead, everyone joined in the choruses. The words were so familiar that, by now, each boy had absorbed them like oxygen. When the sidemen chimed in, “
Oh, let the Midnight Special shine her light on me / Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-lovin’ light on me,
” the boys puffed out their chests and sang with a faintly forbidden enchantment, their voices, once timid and off-key, rising with a greedy incandescence.

Two weeks later, the quartet discovered that another skiffle band—a group with enough of a reputation to impress the boys—was also called the Blackjacks. With no alternative other than to rename the band,
they gathered at Mendips
one afternoon—John, Eric, Pete, Rod, and Nigel—for “a mini-brainstorming.” After a time, Pete facetiously suggested a name that apparently clicked. There was a tradition at the end of the term whereby the entire student body would stand in the auditorium and sing the school song. Everyone knew it by rote; they were forced to practice it endlessly during Prep, with Cliff Cook, a woodworking teacher, hammering it stiffly on the piano. “
Quarry men, old before our birth / Straining each muscle and sinew
…” The Quarry Men. John latched onto it right away, agreeing, “Yep, that sounds good, all right.” But a slight smile betrayed his underlying motivation. The name was nothing if not a send-up of the school. “We’d never strained a muscle or sinew in our life at Quarry Bank,” Shotton gently insists. “So Quarry Men, to me, seemed very appropriate.”

Finding new, fresh material quickly became John’s most pressing goal—and greatest problem. Radio was the most accessible medium, with even the BBC now acquiescing to the skiffle phenomenon, but airplay was still severely limited. Sheet music was scarce, and the cost of records was prohibitive. The only other prospect was going to a record store, where it was possible to preview one or two selections. To John, this was a font of material, and so he, Eric, and Rod joined the other fifth-term Quarry Bank students who climbed over the wall at lunchtime, bought some chips at a
shop outside the school grounds, and made the hajj down Harthill Road to the roundabout at Penny Lane, where a branch of the North End Music Store (or NEMS, as it was known) serviced the small community. “You could listen to the odd record there… in a booth,” Davis says, explaining how it was impossible to crib words under the circumstances, “but then they threw [us] out when they realized [we] weren’t buying anything.”

By the end of April, the momentum was broken by the
defection of Bill Smith
, who proved unreliable and simply stopped showing up for practice. His departure presented no serious threat to the Quarry Men. John and Pete broke into Smith’s garage and “
liberated” the tea-chest bass
, figuring Bill wouldn’t miss it much.

Smith was promptly replaced by Len Garry, the boys’ singing mate from the Bank, who was now in his last year at the Liverpool Institute, in a class with his friend Ivan Vaughan and Paul McCartney. An easygoing, self-confident, and articulate Woolton lad, Len could also be indifferent to the point of distraction. But, as Griffiths recalled, “he could… pluck the strings of the tea chest as well as anybody. It didn’t matter what [notes] he played—he was acceptable as a person.”

The situation became even more exciting when Eric announced, quite unexpectedly, that he had found a drummer who might be of some use to them.
A rarity in Liverpool
, principally because of the cost of a set of drums, there was no greater luxury for a skiffle band. Moreover, it would provide them with an opportunity to play some rock ’n roll, which had always been John’s objective. He was beside himself with anticipation.

Griffiths knew Colin Hanton from traveling home with him on the same bus. A little gamecock of a fellow with a quick grin and hair-trigger temper, Hanton commuted regularly from his job as an apprentice at Guy Rogers, an upholstery firm in Speke that operated out of an airy, modern factory that had been used by the RAF during the war to make airplane parts. The boys had exchanged nodding glances at first, in recognition of being neighbors, then fell into genial chitchat, during which, on one occasion, Hanton divulged that he played the drums. “I was very, very amateur, never a good drummer, probably because I never had lessons,” admits Hanton, who beat out rhythms on the wooden furniture as if he were Sonny Liston, as opposed to Buddy Rich.

Hanton leaped at the invitation, but he knew the score. “I was [asked] to join the group simply because I had a set of drums,” he says without a trace of rancor. “It didn’t matter how bad I played.”

Nigel Walley, who felt slightly left out of the configuration, declared
himself available to be the band’s manager and vowed to get the Quarry Men work. “
I didn’t know the first thing
about managing,” Walley admits now, “but no one had the slightest idea how to go about getting gigs.” Walley discovered soon enough that many of the local stores in Woolton Village would accept posters, if they looked professional. “John made up a nice-looking ad in colored inks that said, ‘Country-and-western, rock ’n roll, skiffle band—The Quarry Men—Open for Engagements—Please Call Nigel Walley, Tel. GAtacre 1715,’ ” and they convinced the manager of Mantle’s record shop to place it centrally, in the window.
Business cards
, printed by Charles Roberts, carried basically the same legend.

Nigel’s early efforts to place the Quarry Men in a paying gig proved fruitless. Still, no one more than John Lennon was convinced that fame and fortune were but a phone call away.

The Quarry Men were too enamored of the spotlight to worry about paying gigs. The experience alone was enough to keep them turning up at practice. There were a number of places they found suitable for rehearsal. Eric Griffiths’s house was usually available during the day: his father, a pilot, had been killed during the war, and his mother worked, so the place was invariably empty. On Saturday afternoons they jammed in Colin Hanton’s living room, on Heyscroft Road, while his mother was out grocery shopping, or they went around the corner to Rod Davis’s. Even Mimi hosted a couple of practices, minus the heavy equipment. “
The tea-chest bass and my drums
would have been too much for [her],” Hanton points out, so the boys limited rehearsals there to some singing, mindful to “watch [their] p’s and q’s.”