The Beatles (12 page)

Partly out of recognition of that change, Pete Shotton felt he was no longer equipped to remain with the band. He never liked participating to begin with, but the rigors of playing rock ’n roll demanded more than his thimbled fingers were able to contribute. The rhythm brought him into
direct competition with Colin Hanton. At the Cavern, when John started to rock, Hanton occasionally hit a rim shot to sauce up the accompaniment. As Shotton recalls, “
The sound of it got to me
. I didn’t think it [was] right. So I told him, ‘Don’t hit it like that, it sounds awful.’ ” Instead of a compliant response, Hanton instructed him to “fuck off.” A few weeks later John and Pete crossed swords at a party, ostensibly over the washboard. They had played outdoors, at a birthday celebration thrown by Hanton’s aunt, who lived in Toxteth. Afterward, the best mates wandered inside her house with their instruments and chugged down a few pints each. They sat there convulsed with laughter while John tossed off jokes and wisecracks at other guests’ expense. Eventually, Shotton’s gaze drifted toward his lap, where the washboard lay balanced on his knees. He rocked it slightly, to draw his friend’s attention to it, and admitted what up till then had been tacitly unspoken between them: “I hate this, John. It’s not for me.” Shotton recalls being stunned by what happened next. “[John] picked up the washboard and smashed it over my head, just like that!” Pete says. “The tin part came out, and the frame was wrapped around my [shoulders].” Smirking slightly, John stared at the ridiculous scene he’d created and said, “Well, that solves
that,
then, doesn’t it?”

The real focus of their tension wasn’t the washboard or their friendship, however; it was the future of the Quarry Men. The band could not seem to generate momentum. Having outlived a brief honeymoon, during which John evaluated each band member and his contribution to the group, it became clear to him that, to continue at all, two elements were absolutely crucial: seriousness and ability. Shotton possessed neither quality. “It was perfectly obvious [to him] that I wasn’t musical,” Shotton says, “and John was taking the band seriously. [At last,] he really wanted to be a musician.”

A few obligations remained, for which Pete agreed to play, including one that his mother had arranged at the St. Peter’s garden fete, the most important event on Woolton’s social calendar. Otherwise, the band needed simple retooling. Perhaps replacing Pete wasn’t even necessary. Drums were all the percussion that was really needed, especially if the band moved further away from skiffle. But there were other cogs in the machine—namely, personality and ambition. It must have been unnervingly clear to John that he was never going anywhere with this gang.

The Quarry Men had run its course as far as a frolic was concerned. Len, Griff, Rod, even Colin—they were in it for a laugh. He couldn’t
blame them for that, but somehow there was more at stake now for John Lennon. And here it was unraveling, slipping away. Sacking Pete, as it were, only precipitated the obvious destiny, though it is doubtful John could see it. With some distance he might have realized that it spelled the end of his band—and signaled the beginning of another.

Chapter 4
The Showman

T
he Quarry Men set out in pursuit of their dream at a time when the world, especially Great Britain, seemed poised to oblige them. An enormous shift was taking place, nudged on by the climax of World War II and wrenched sideways by its aftershocks. The leitmotif of postwar life was the idea of endlessly unfolding progress.
Jet plane travel idled
on the horizon, as did color TV and England’s first high-speed motorway. Many working-class families in urban wastelands were moved into council estates near the suburbs, or into newly created towns. And despite a 47 percent increase in the cost of living, the growth in wages nearly doubled, putting more money in people’s pockets than at any time in fifty years. As Harold Macmillan, in his July 1957 speech at Bedford Market Place, enthused: “
Indeed, let us be frank
about it, most of our people have never had it so good.”

And those who believe, as Donne contends, that all circumstance is “
slave to fate
” would glean further significance from the fact that John Lennon and a teenager who would become his closest friend and partner began the school year of 1957 in twin limestone buildings linked by a courtyard and located within a hundred feet of each other. “
There was neither an affiliation
, nor appreciable synergy, between the art college and Liverpool Institute,” Quentin Hughes indicates in his sage evaluation, “but the proximity was such that they invited a certain kinship.” If John’s awakening to rock ’n roll and the formation of the Quarry Men was a prelude to what was to come, the arrival of the boy across the street commenced the first act of the legend. His name, of course, was Paul.

On the surface, Paul McCartney had it made. He possessed not only the most striking physical characteristics of the McCartney clan but also the
expansiveness of their humor, their passion for music, and their practice of urbanity so epitomized by his uncle, the family patriarch, Jack McCartney, who was described as being “
one of nature’s true gentlemen
.” In a city of characters distinguished by dry, pithy pragmatists, Jack may have been the one Scouser who played against part. Tall, gaunt, always relentlessly debonair, he was a bon vivant and brilliant spinner of yarns in a raspy, unearthly voice that held listeners in thrall. As a deputy of the ubiquitous Liverpool Corporation, the bureaucratic rat’s nest that ran the city, he feasted on its foibles like a stand-up comedian. Everybody had a smile for Jack McCartney.

Such was the role of a patriarch in a family of underprivileged Scousers who refused to be cowed by their circumstances. Jack, the eldest among the nine children of Joe and Florrie McCartney, was a man for the new age: gregarious, pleasure-seeking, and properly awestruck. All Joe McCartney’s children—James (Jim), Joseph, Edith, Ann Alice, Millie, Jack, Ann, Jin, and Joe (named for an elder brother who died young)—it was noted, were “gentle, happy-go-lucky dreamers” and, fortunately, resourceful, if not simply oblivious, in their efforts to avoid the city’s strong criminal undercurrent. Despite their inquisitiveness, each chose to remain Merseyside.

The McCartneys were a boisterous crew, alight with affection. In 1912, nine years after Jim’s birth, Joe moved literally around the corner and resettled the family in a new, cheaply constructed
terrace house at 3 Solva
Street in Everton, a residential district in northeastern Liverpool, roughly three-quarters of a mile from the city center. The McCartney place, at the beginning of a narrow, cobblestone cul-de-sac, was woefully small for an ever-expanding family, but really no different from any neighbor’s situation in the solid but overcrowded Irish enclave. One of the rare remaining photos of the house (it was demolished in the Liverpool Slum Clearance Program of the late 1960s) depicts a sad, deeply rutted structure stripped of any decorative amenity other than what was required to hold it together. It was a typical redbrick Victorian cereal box, with three stingy bedrooms outfitted like barracks and a front parlor whose threadbare couch was occupied in shifts to accommodate the extra-heavy traffic. The toilet—really little more than a hole, a hunch-down arrangement, below two horizontal boards—was in a shed out beyond the kitchen and was shared by two other families, the Dowds and the Simnors, with washroom facilities in even shorter supply. Each Saturday morning, all the kids grabbed towels, a washcloth, soap, and clean underwear and trooped over to
the Margaret Street Baths
, a public swimming pool, for their weekly
scrubbing. For Jim McCartney, who had an almost feline fastidiousness about his appearance, extreme measures were required just to stay comparatively groomed.

Before the McCartneys arrived, in the early nineteenth century, Everton had been “
a place to aspire to
.” Built on a steep natural ridge known as the Heights, it was the most elevated point in Liverpool, invigorated by the pure sea air, with views over the Mersey and Liverpool Bay across to the Welsh hills. It was, according to J. A. Picton, “
a suburb of which Liverpool
had cause to be proud.” Compared with the unsavory city center, it was considered “
a healthy place to live
” and drew the wealthy upper crust of society to its lush parkland setting. Noble mansions, in tier above tier, looked out on a lovely landscape. The district’s dense roster of churches spoke optimistically of its expectations: an expanse of cathedrals dotted the landscape, not the least of which was stately St. George’s, the first cast-iron church in the world. But by 1860 its allure had all but evaporated. A victim in its own right of the Irish potato famine, Everton was transformed into a ghetto known as Little Dublin, the first terminal of swarming refugees, as inbred and overcrowded as Calcutta. By 1881, the onetime jeweled paradise had become the most densely populated area of the city, its patchwork fields clawed under to dower the mazy grid of roads thronged by “cottages,” which sounds pastoral but is actually a euphemism for cheap terrace houses.

Jim McCartney probably had little time to submit to the temptations that were everywhere on Everton’s streets. His days were devoted almost entirely to part-time work in order to compensate for his father’s insufficient salary at Cope’s Tobacco (Everton’s largest employer, where he worked for thirty-two years as a cutter), various household chores, and the duty of watching out for six brothers and sisters who were barely of school age. With brother Jack, he attended the nearby Steers Street School, a county primary named for the city’s first dock engineer, just off Everton Road. He was a decent student but “
never really excelled
” in any subject, and left school at fourteen, as soon as he was old enough for a regular job.

For an Irish lad in Liverpool, the priesthood was the highest work, but it was a calling from which the McCartney boys were “gratefully exempt.” “
Joe put all his faith
in the almighty pound,” says an old Everton resident, “and he raised his sons to believe employment came before godliness.” Jack, who found a rock-steady, if innocuous, position with the Liverpool Corporation, offered to “inquire there” on behalf of his vivacious younger brother, but Jim had a taste for something more exciting. Eagerly and with
great expectations, Jim went to work as a sample boy in the office of A. Hannay & Co., one of the myriad cotton firms servicing the Lancashire mills, where he did what salesmen referred to as “
the donkey work”—running along
Old Hall Street with bundles of extra-long-staple Sudanese, short-staple Indian, or strict low middling Memphis cotton earmarked for brokers or merchants in various salesrooms. He worked ten-hour days, five days a week, for less than £1, plus a bonus each Christmas that often doubled his annual salary. The duties called for neither much initiative nor imagination, but in the process, Jim soaked up the ins and outs of the business—from grading and warehousing to negotiating and bookkeeping—much of it over stand-up lunches with salesmen at the local pub.

A jovial, effusive man with a penchant for deadpan humor and the idioms of the Liverpool Irish, Jim McCartney had a streak of romanticism in him that can be traced directly to the influence of music. The house on Solva Street was flush with it; one form or another provided a constant soundtrack to the raucous family soap opera that unspooled in the overcrowded rooms.
Joe loved opera
and played the cumbersome E-flat double bass in the local Territorial Army band that entertained regularly in Stanley Park and at the commemorative parades that snaked along Netherfield Road so often that they seemed biweekly occurrences. When he wasn’t marching, there were evening practices with his brass band at Cope’s Tobacco. And Joe often played the double bass at home, hoping to encourage his children to pursue some form of music.

As it happened, none of the McCartney kids showed much interest. It wasn’t until 1918, when a neighbor unloaded his fusty piano, purchased from the local NEMS store, on Joe that the gesture bore real fruit. In no time, Jim had taught himself a shorthand method of chording that allowed him to play along with popular songs of the day.
He had a brittle, choppy style
that suited the syncopation inherent to ragtime, whose melodies seemed to fill every dance hall and pub. Nothing made Jim feel more carefree than music, and his exposure to potent entertainers only heightened this passion. He and Jack stole off regularly to the Hippodrome and the Olympia, both ornate neighborhood theaters, to catch the latest music hall revue. Standing along the Hippy’s balcony wall, the McCartney brothers enjoyed acts such as Harry Houdini, Little Tich, the Two Bobs, Charlie Chaplin, Rob Wilton, George Formby Sr., and the Great Hackenschmidt. “
My father learned his music
from listening to it every single night of the week, two shows every night, Sundays off,” Paul recalled. Jim entertained
every chance he got, playing for family gatherings and impromptu community mixers. While oppressive summer days brought Everton to an early boil, more than a dozen neighbors often congregated in the street below the McCartneys’ parlor window and danced to Jim’s accompaniment into the night.