The Beatles (21 page)

Unfortunately, his timing couldn’t have been worse. Lancashire was plagued by an economic slump that had forced thousands of Liverpudlians to go on the dole. The widening tide of the Depression had engulfed the
North. Overland work was scarce for a journeyman sailor, and Harry, who had no applicable skills aside from haircutting, which had been a hobby at sea, depended on charity to pull them through. The family moved into a modest terrace house in a South Liverpool area known as Wavertree. With Louise’s meager earnings as a grocer’s clerk and twenty-three shillings provided benevolently by the state, there was barely enough to cover expenses.

It took almost two years of scraping by before Harry landed a job. He began working for the Liverpool Corporation, as a streetcar conductor on the Speke-Liverpool route, when an unexpected opening for a driver vaulted him into a permanent position. He loved bus driving from the first day he slipped behind the wheel, and in thirty-one years on the job, there was never a day in which he regarded it as anything but a sacred, businesslike obligation. That meant striking an uncharacteristic facade: his long putty face was always pleasant in private, but on the bus it was expressionless, grim, like a rock. Paul McCartney, a frequent passenger on Harry’s route, remembered “being a little disturbed about the hardness in his character,” considering a first-name familiarity with most of the passengers and the distant way in which he treated them.

Within two years, Louise gave birth to another boy, Peter, and two years after that, on February 25, 1943, George Harold was born, completing the Harrison family portrait. George was an unnaturally beautiful child. Dark-haired and dark-eyed with skin like polished bone and a lean-jawed face that favored his father’s features, he quickly developed the kind of strong, intimate armor that inures the youngest sibling to getting constantly picked on.

The Harrisons were a boisterous crew—good-natured boisterous. “
They’d yell at each other
and swear around the [dinner] table,” recalls Arthur Kelly. There was a good deal of taunting and ridiculing one another—none of which was levied with any unpleasantness. In fact, Kelly says he was envious of their noisy rapport, the earthy way they expressed their affections. “I enjoyed being there… because with all the uproar they were very much a family.”

And very much in need. Harry’s civil-service job was as steady as a heartbeat, but money was always tight. As George later discovered, his father would never earn more than £10 a week driving a bus. In 1947, with four children to feed and clothe, there was never enough from his £6-a-week salary to provide simple luxuries like sugar and fresh fruit. Rationing put a further strain on their daily table. Even with Louise’s influence at the grocer’s, it was difficult enough to lay hands on butter and meat for six
people without plying the black market, and that cost plenty—too much for the Harrisons. Although Harry’s “overtime money and… winnings from snooker tournements” helped some, it didn’t solve their pressing needs. They teetered precariously on the brink of debt—not crippling debt, but the kind of slow, agonizing squeeze that strangles the dreams and pleasures of poor, hardworking families. On top of everything else, they’d outgrown their accommodations; the tiny, unheated house in Wavertree was bursting at the seams, the toilet in the backyard an objectionable hazard.

All that, however, was to change overnight. Incredibly, in 1949 the Harrison family fortunes took an unexpected twist: they hit the lottery. Well, not exactly the lottery, but nearly as good: after they had been languishing for eighteen years on what everyone assumed was just a fictitious waiting list, the Liverpool Corporation drew the Harrisons’ name from its deep well of housing applicants and moved them to 25 Upton Green, a spanking new council house located on an established parcel of the Speke estate, about half a mile from where Paul McCartney lived.

Their good fortune “seemed fantastic” to six-year-old George, who, as the youngest family member, had always been last in line for everything. Living in Upton Green meant some space and a chance to develop his own identity. The house, though relatively small, was comfortable by council standards and offered a boy endless opportunities for exploration. Its layout, unlike Wavertree, was circuitous, with a center hall that spilled into a front parlor and dining area without necessitating a detour through the kitchen, and four tiny upstairs bedrooms, including one all his own for George. There was even a garden in the front that opened onto a close, where he could ride his bicycle without having to dodge traffic. George couldn’t have been happier. Louise Harrison was less rhapsodic, dismissing the neighborhood impudently as “a slum-clearance area,” but her criticism was probably a reaction more to the melting pot of residents she encountered there—people with whom an Irish primitive like Louise had little familiarity—than to its aesthetics.

Called Geo (pronounced
Joe
) by his family, George initially seemed poised for even greater upward mobility. His term at nearby Dovedale Primary, which John Lennon had also attended, was a small triumph. He was no scholar, but he was an apt pupil with good manners and passed the eleven-plus scholarship with a solid enough margin to assure himself a coveted place in one of Liverpool’s grammar schools. That was reason alone to celebrate in the Harrison family. Harry talked tirelessly about the importance of a good education and how hard work in school was the only
way to escape a dreaded life of poverty and physical labor, how it would give one the chance to be somebody,
a “blood
,” perhaps (for bluebloods, as he called them), to achieve the security he’d always longed for. But none of George’s siblings had their heart set on university. Louise, though she brought home high marks, had no intention of going beyond high school. Harry Jr. and Peter were bright boys, but neither was a particularly good student; they’d gone straight into a trade. George, on the other hand, gave his father a glimmer of hope that at least one of his sons would go on to university and make something of himself.

And while part of that dream would be fulfilled in spades, it would be about as far from the halls of ivy as a boy could reasonably stray.

Within weeks of entering the Liverpool Institute, George Harrison altered the course of his trajectory—not prudently and gradually but recklessly and radically—in ways that no one could have predicted. He was marked for trouble from the start. Uncooperative, indifferent, and unmotivated in class, conspicuously immature, stubborn to the point of rebelliousness, he was adrift in a school that stressed discipline and conformity. Under guidelines that applied to all institute boys, students were required to wear black blazers, a gray or white shirt with a green-striped tie, a badge, cap, gray trousers, and black shoes. George, already testing authority, wore tight-fitting checkered shirts, inverting the tie with the wide band tucked away so that only the narrow flap hung down, black drainpipes, and—somewhat prophetically—blue suede shoes. His hair, which had grown extravagantly long—long enough for his father to label him “
a refugee from a Tarzan
picture”—was plastered back in a quiff with palmfuls of gel to make it behave, topped with sugar water so that it would dry like Sheetrock. Everything he did seemed calculated to attract attention. “Basically, George and I were a couple of outcasts,” Arthur Kelly says. Sometimes he and Kelly simply stayed away altogether, “sagging off” school to smoke cigarettes and eat chips in a nearby cinema called the Tattler that played an endless reel of cartoons.

Eventually, they’d be hauled before Headmaster Edwards, a humorless, ruddy-faced martinet who would mete out an appropriate punishment. But oddly, none was forthcoming. What seems most probable is that the school chose not to expend the energy on such hopeless cases as these
lads. Later, misplaced feelings of anger and persecution arose—George railed against “
being dictated to
” by authority figures and blamed “
schizophrenic jerk[s]
, just out of teachers training college” for failing to stimulate his interest—but in retrospect, Kelly realizes they’d brought it on themselves. No doubt they could have found a way, like other lackadaisical classmates, to balance outside interests with a regimen of studies. But Kelly says they fell victim to extenuating circumstances: “
From about the age of thirteen
, all we were interested in was rock ’n roll.”

Music in some form
had always filled the Harrison residence. Louise loved to sing, to put it mildly. Her voice wasn’t particularly melodious, but it was strong and vibrant, and her enthusiasm was infectious, even if it occasionally “
shocked” a visitor
, who recalls its “window-rattling” effect. Far be it from Harry to discourage her: when he was at sea, Harry had always brought presents for her, and one day in 1932 he arrived home with a
splendid rosewood gramophone
he’d picked up in the States. From that day on, “
loads and loads of records
”—those bulky 78 rpm “discs,” as they were called, made of shellac and as fragile as an old dinner plate—blared at all hours in the parlor.
Ted Heath and Hoagy Carmichael
were featured regularly, but Louise’s favorite was Victor Sylvester, whose big band swung with the intensity of a jungle telegraph. They had a radio, too, which Louise kept tuned to the BBC frequency, where every night, precisely at 8:10, the resident orchestra performed a tight medley of standards. Louise and Harry never missed that show. And no doubt it had a lasting effect on George, in the same way the Sunday-morning broadcast from Radio India, with its jangly sitar ragas, crept into his psyche.

As seems to be the pattern with Liverpool boys, George first connected with the ubiquitous Lonnie Donegan. That locomotive voice and the simplicity of skiffle “
just seemed made for me
,” he told a biographer, recalling his earliest musical influence, along with Josh White and Hoagy Carmichael.
Sitting in the front mezzanine
of the Liverpool Empire, next to his brother Harold’s girlfriend (and eventual wife), Irene, he stared transfixed at the Great One, who played a concert there in the fall of 1956. One can only imagine the impression it made on George.
Later, fanzine writers
would insist that he sat through all four of Donegan’s performances, going so far as to roust the singer from his bedside and demand an autograph, but that appears to be myth. Whatever the extent of George’s intentness, there
remains little question of his fascination and the explosion it would touch off within him.

Not long thereafter, he bought a copy of “Rock Island Line” and invited Arthur Kelly to his house to hear it. “
By the end of that afternoon
, we said [to each other], ‘Let’s get guitars.’ ” George appealed to his mother, who was all for it. On this rare occasion, he had done his homework: an old Dovedale schoolmate, Raymond Hughes, was selling a three-quarter-size Egmond guitar, “
a crappy old piece
of junk,” for
the unlikely price of £3 10s.
, and he knew that Louise, a notoriously easy touch, had a reserve stash that would cover it. Arthur Kelly, whose family wasn’t any better off than George’s, talked his parents into spending the extravagant sum of £15 on a lovely lacquered studio model, with an arched top, scratch plate, and racy
f
-holes. Two days later, in a picture taken against the house in the Harrisons’ backyard, both boys strike an age-old stance, with guitars cradled lovingly in their arms, listing slightly to the left. George is laying down an arthritic-looking C chord—one finger at a time, positioning each one precisely, the way a crane operator might plant steel girders at a construction site. His body is arched in concentration, joints and muscle taut as rubber bands. A checkered shirt is open at the collar, black jeans cinched high around his waist; otherwise, his clothes don’t give an inch—they look as snug and awkward as the guitars. But his face, knit studiously in thought, conveys utter confidence.

In fact, frustrated with his inability to immediately conquer the guitar, he “
put it away in the cupboard
” for several months, ignoring it like another grammar-school textbook. It took a sharp nudge from overseas to jump-start his enthusiasm. Arthur Kelly’s brother-in-law Red, who had been stationed in New York on business, brought home “armfuls of presents” for Kelly’s sister upon his return. For Arthur, the crux of his largesse was records—not the brittle 78s, which were bountiful in Liverpool, but crystal-clear, durable 33s and 45s, virtual novelties in England, which to Kelly’s young ears “sounded astounding.” Most were by established crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Jackie Gleason, but among them was an EP by the curiously named Elvis Presley.

“The first track was ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ ” Kelly says, recalling Elvis’s cover version, “and before it was over I had George on the phone.”

Elvis appealed to everything smoldering in George—his ambivalence, his restlessness, and the rut of inertia from which there seemed no relief. The shock of Elvis Presley threw it all into gear: his voice juiced the circuits;
the arrangements drove his imagination wild. Suddenly, everything vague and numbing now had some relevance. George recovered his guitar from the cupboard and, with Kelly as his enthusiastic accomplice, began an odyssey that would surpass not only Elvis but all of his dreams.