Paul McCartney (11 page)

The Quarrymen had recently lost another member when tea chest bassist Len Garry contracted a near-fatal case of meningitis and had to spend many weeks in hospital. That gave Paul a further opportunity to modernise the line-up by bringing in his Institute classmate John Duff Lowe, a former chorister at Liverpool Cathedral, who could play Jerry Lee Lewis-style arpeggios on the piano. So for their recording debut with Percy Phillips–John, Paul and George, plus pianist Lowe and drummer Colin Hanton–the Quarrymen were a rock band at last.

Phillips’s studio was the sitting-room of his Victorian terrace house in Kensington, a Liverpool district named after the Royal London borough. As an A-side, the Quarrymen chose ‘That’ll Be the Day’, the Crickets’ first and greatest hit, with John singing Buddy Holly’s lead vocal, Paul and George on harmonies and George replicating–more or less–Holly’s jangly solo guitar. The B-side was one of Paul’s solo-written songs, ‘In Spite of All the Danger’, inspired by Elvis Presley’s ‘Tryin’ to Get to You’, which he’d heard at Boy Scout camp. Actually, it was a remarkably authentic-sounding Country and Western ballad featuring the already perfect vinaigrette harmony of Lennon and McCartney, with a rather shaky counter-harmony by George.

For eleven shillings and sixpence (about 67p) the Quarrymen received one ten-inch aluminium and acetate disc. Their name did not appear on its yellow ‘Kensington’ label: only the song-titles and composing credits, handwritten by Paul. ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ was credited to ‘McCartney–Harrison’ in recognition of the guitar fills George had contributed.

They couldn’t afford to have copies made, so had to share that one disc on a rota-system, each keeping it for a week to play to family and friends, then surrendering it to the next in line. However, when it reached pianist John Duff Lowe, he failed to pass it on, nobody else claimed their turn, and Lowe drifted out of the band soon afterwards still with it in his possession. When it resurfaced 23 years later, it would be rated the world’s most valuable record.

Among the surviving participants there’s some dispute about the exact date of the recording, but a plaque on Percy Phillips’s old house, 38 Kensington, states it to have been 14 July 1958. If that is true, it had the most ghastly of sequels. The very next day, John’s mother, Julia, was killed by a speeding car as she crossed the road a few yards from Aunt Mimi’s front gate.

A cinema film about the young John, Nowhere Boy, released in 2009, showed him reacting to Julia’s death like a typical, uncontrolled twenty-first-century adolescent, first punching Paul in the mouth, then clinging to him and sobbing hysterically on his shoulder. In reality, British boys in the 1950s, whatever their background, were still ruled by the Victorian code of the stiff upper lip. As devastated as John was, he kept his grief as secret as Paul had after Mary McCartney’s death two years earlier.

But their empathy now had an extra, sad dimension. In future, after they’d become the world’s darlings, they would sometimes drop their guard, discuss their common loss and allow the tears to harmonise in their eyes.

‘Paul seemed to make John come alive when they were together’

John’s arrival at Liverpool College of Art in the autumn of 1957 should have removed him from the sphere of the two Liverpool Institute schoolboys who now formed the nucleus of the Quarrymen. But actually it brought them closer. Their respective seats of learning shared the complex of neoclassical Victorian buildings that had started life as a ‘mechanics institute’, the art college in Hope Street backing onto the Inny in Mount Street. Each day as Paul and George sat in class, John was just on the other side of the wall.

Things still might have turned out differently if he had immersed himself in his new life as an art student. However, during his first terms at college, he remained as much a misfit as at school, sticking doggedly to his proletarian Teddy boy look, staying aloof from his fellow students–all but the prettier female ones–and refusing to think about anything except rock ‘n’ roll.

Though the art college and the Institute had long since been blocked off from each other, there was a connecting door between them, accessed through a small yard. Paul and George were thus able to meet up with John in the college for illicit guitar-practice during their lunch hour. Among crowds of art students, a uniformed Institute pupil would instantly have been spotted and sent back to his own territory. But the resourceful Paul had a blazer-badge attached to his breast pocket only with pins, allowing it to be removed and replaced at will. If he also took off his green, gold and black school tie, he could pass for a legitimate college denizen in a plain black jacket and white shirt.

John’s fellow student Helen Anderson remembers him ushering Paul in, with George, their tag-along junior, usually following a little later. The three would go into the cafeteria for a cheap lunch of chips, then take their guitars into an empty life-drawing room, which tended to be more spacious than others. Helen, being extraordinarily beautiful, was among the very few they allowed to watch while they rehearsed. ‘Paul would have a school notebook and he’d be scribbling down words,’ she says. ‘Those sessions could be intense because John was used to getting his way by being aggressive–but Paul would stand his ground. Paul seemed to make John come alive when they were together.’

The pair’s songwriting sessions, by contrast, generally took place in private. They tried it first in John’s tiny room at ‘Mendips’, seated side-by-side on his narrow single bed, but there was so little space that their guitars’ machine-heads (the part with the tuning-pegs) would keep colliding. Usually, too, Aunt Mimi would be in the sitting-room directly underneath, chafing at the ‘caterwauling’ she could hear through the ceiling. Before long, she banished them to the only part of the house out of earshot–its glassed-in front porch. The porch was bleak and draughty, with nowhere to sit, but it lent their puny acoustic guitars a satisfying echo.

Mimi remained resolutely unimpressed by anything her nephew composed with his ‘little friend’. ‘John would say, “We’ve got this song, Mimi, do you want to hear it?”’ she recalled. ‘And I would say, “Certainly not… front porch, John Lennon, front porch.”’ What she overheard that clearly wasn’t ‘caterwauling’ became another way of discomfiting John. ‘[He] got very upset with me when I mentioned one night that I thought Paul was the better guitar player. That set him off, banging away on his own guitar. There was quite a bit of rivalry going on there.’

The only place where they could really concentrate was Paul’s music-friendly home, especially during the afternoons when his father was at work. For John, cutting classes at the art college meant nothing, but it was the first time Paul had ever played truant–in Liverpudlian, ‘sagged off’–from school. Now the partnership fully coalesced as they sat by the fireplace in their small facing armchairs, one guitar pointing leftward, the other rightward. ‘Instead of looking into my own mind for a song, I could watch John playing,’ Paul would remember, ‘as if he was holding a mirror up to what I was doing.’ Their voices created the same effect, John’s acrid lead melding with Paul’s high, supple harmony like vinegar with virgin olive oil.

For stimulation, they brewed endless cups of tea in the tiny kitchen and smoked cheap Woodbine cigarettes or Typhoo tea-leaves noxiously in a pipe belonging to Paul’s dad. When musical inspiration temporarily failed, they wrote Goonish monologues and playlets on a portable typewriter–John was a surprisingly fast and accurate typist–or made elaborate hoax telephone calls to anyone they happened to dislike at the moment.

Jim McCartney soon discovered what was going on, but made no attempt to stop it, even though he would have been held responsible for Paul’s truancy by the educational authorities if it had come to light. Jim, in fact, was just as worried by the friendship as Aunt Mimi, but was always hospitable to John, merely warning Paul privately (and, it would prove, all too accurately), ‘He’ll get you into trouble, son.’

Often the sessions went on into the evening, when Jim and Paul’s brother were home. Mike McCartney had become a keen amateur photographer and snapped the songwriters continually, sometimes catching John in the Buddy Holly glasses he still hid from the world.

Just before Christmas, after a session with Paul that had lasted until almost midnight, he took off his glasses as always and walked home down Mather Avenue in his customary state of near-blindness. Next day, he remarked to Paul about the ‘funny people’ who lived in a house he passed en route and who, despite the late hour and the cold, had been ‘out in their front garden, playing cards’. Paul took a look, and realised that what John had mistaken for a late-night outdoor card-school were models of Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus in an illuminated Nativity creche.

Even now there were still some songs that Paul preferred to work on alone and keep to himself as they seemed too close to his father’s traditional tastes to let John hear. ‘I wasn’t necessarily looking to be a rocker,’ he would recall. ‘When I wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four”, I thought I was writing a song for Sinatra.’

Sagging off from school inevitably had consequences. In the summer of 1958, 16-year-old Paul took his GCE O-Level exams but passed in just one subject, French. That meant spending the best part of another year in the fifth form before he could re-sit the exam. By next time round, he’d pulled himself together sufficiently to pass English language, English literature, art and maths, but still failed history, geography, religious knowledge and German.

He then went into the Inny’s sixth form for a two-year course ending in Advanced Level exams which normally led to university or other higher education. But Paul oddly seemed not to be considered university material; instead it was suggested he might train to become a teacher, as George’s older sister Louise had done. What he might teach was suggested by his two A-Level subjects, art and English.

In the latter, he was taught by the Institute’s head of English, Alan ‘Dusty’ Durband, an inspirational educator who, among other things, co-founded Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre and authored numerous textbooks and study-guides. The impression Paul made was initially none too favourable. ‘He’d slink into class,’ Durband later remembered, ‘as if he couldn’t care less.’

His attitude changed when the class read Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Durband overcame their misgivings about the fourteenth-century English by pointing out the numerous bawdy references to arses and farts. ‘Paul was inspired. You could see he found something with Chaucer, and then the other writers we looked at. He was passionate about words and using them and learning from how others had used them. I think he had that desire all along to write something that people would remember.’

Even to so enlightened a teacher, John Lennon and the Quarrymen represented nothing but a waste of valuable study-time for Paul, and 1959 would do little to alter that view.

Bad luck set in early. On the afternoon of 1 January, they were returning by bus from their old stamping ground, Wilson Hall, after playing at a New Year’s Day party for the Speke Bus Depot Social Club. The date had been arranged through George’s dad, who sat on the club committee, and its recompense included so much free beer that even Paul ended up almost incapable of performing. During the hung-over, recriminatory homeward journey, something was said that upset their drummer Colin Hanton, who disembarked with his kit one stop too early and never turned out for another gig.

Anyway, rock ‘n’ roll seemed to have run out of steam, vindicating all those who’d dismissed it as merely a passing fad and its stars as squalid fraudsters. Elvis had publicly repented by joining the US Army and having his gorgeous quiff and sideburns ritually planed off. Little Richard, the nonpareil shrieker and piano-pounder, had abandoned a world tour to train for the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis’s career had nosedived after a British tour, when he was found to be bigamously married to his 13-year-old cousin. Then on 3 February Buddy Holly died in a plane crash along with J.P. ‘the Big Bopper’ Richardson and 16-year-old Latino rocker Ritchie Valens. This last was a particular tragedy for the Quarrymen, who still relied heavily on Holly’s instantly usable three-chord songs and riffs.

In America, the furores around the various performers, and a payola scandal involving several top disc-jockeys–among them Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed, the man who’d given rock ‘n’ roll its name–seemed to have tainted the music beyond redemption. The shrieking, flaunting, scowling rockers were replaced by blandly-pretty boy crooners, mostly called Bobby, whose every ingratiating breath proclaimed them utterly hygienic and harmless.

Viscerally exciting music survived only in blues, R&B and rockabilly records that British buyers as a rule could find only in expensive ‘imports’ at specialist London stores. But Liverpool had a back-door free supply thanks to its still-flourishing transatlantic liner trade. Ship’s crews on the New York run–a self-consciously superior and stylish breed known as ‘Cunard Yanks’–would bring home hot-off-the-press Stateside releases and pass them on to relatives or friends who played music. There was hot competition to be the first to learn the latest Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley or Coasters track and then perform it live.

Ranged against the still-skiffly Quarrymen were dozens of highly-accomplished rock bands with Yank-worshipping names–Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Karl Terry and the Cruisers, Derry and the Seniors, Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. They tended to be slightly older working men with well-paid jobs on the docks or in factories who could afford to equip themselves with matching suits and impressive arsenals of guitars, saxes and amps from Hessy’s music shop. And the first requirement for entry to this fraternity was a drummer. In Rory Storm’s Hurricanes, he was Ritchie Starkey, a sad-eyed boy from the Dingle who used the stage name Ringo Starr.

The Quarrymen’s Colin Hanton was not the greatest player, but his undersized kit had pardoned everything. And finding a replacement for him now seemed an impossibility. Even the most beaten-up second-hand drums couldn’t be had for less than about £25. Anybody possessing such a prize would be looking to join some grown-up band with saxes and matching suits, not an art student and two schoolboys.