The Beatles (23 page)

As for George, he felt liberated. He’d been doing his musical homework without any real payoff, no outlet in which to show what he could do; this was a chance to work with some dedicated players who shared his aims and interests. To join up with his grammar-school mentor had been a godsend, and now a character like John, as well—it was almost too good to believe. George later said, “
I don’t know what I felt
about him when I first met him; I just thought he was O.K.” But Arthur Kelly disagrees. “
George idolized John
from the outset,” Kelly says. “We all did. He was one of those guys you couldn’t take your eyes off. It was a combination of everything: his sense of humor, his attitude, the way he dressed. Even if he sat there saying nothing, you felt drawn to him.” Together, John and Paul were pure magnetism; they had everything George wanted. Says Kelly, “When he met Paul and John, they were the missing links.”

Not everyone in the band, however, felt as comfortable with the new configuration. Everyone knew that John had his heart set on a three-man
guitar front line; in terms of skill alone, the lineup was clear. An initial rehearsal attended by George put it right under Eric Griffiths’s nose. A quiet, sensitive boy to begin with,
Griff “took it badly
.” Afterward, he cornered Colin Hanton and expressed his uneasiness. Hanton, in his own right, wasn’t blind to it.
“I said to him, ‘Don’t feel so bad
, I’m only on borrowed time, too,’ ” Colin recalls. “John and Paul were getting too serious about the band. Eventually they’d decide that the drummer just wasn’t up to it.”

John and Paul eventually forced the issue. One Saturday afternoon a rehearsal was hastily called at Paul’s house, made unprecedented by Griff’s conspicuous absence. They simply hadn’t told him about it. “It was an awful situation,” Hanton admits. Forty years later, he still feels the flush of betrayal. And that wasn’t the end of it. Coincidentally, Griff telephoned Paul’s house while the Quarry Men were running down a number. “And they made me deal with it, then and there,” Hanton recalls. “John and Paul refused to acknowledge the situation.” They stayed in another room, “tinker[ing] on their guitars,” removing themselves from the fray.

Rather than participate in the fallout, Griff honorably walked away. He’d had enough of a taste of show business, enough of a friendship riven by ambition. And, his standards being very simple, he had enough sense to know when to quit.

A similar fate would have befallen
Len Garry
had he not contracted tubercular meningitis. Confined to a ward in Fazakerley Hospital for seven months, he simply drifted away from the others—out of sight, out of mind.

Normally, as a band loses members, it snowballs into decline. But with the Quarry Men, just the opposite happened. The group, pared down to its core musicians, got very tight. Where before they had lacked a vision—a way of playing songs that brought their literal interpretations to life—there was now an unmuzzled sense of creativity. Fragments of individual passages clicked into place. Rehearsals took on a more practical imperative. The three future Beatles spent time retooling jagged arrangements, using what each boy brought to the equation, so that the songs acquired tension and excitement. To one observer, “it was
like cracking code
.” Three guitarists playing with a more concentrated focus succeeded in brightening and clarifying what had been the group’s increasingly shapeless sound. Old songs that had vibrated with too many possibilities evolved exponentially, with new resonance, new exuberance.

The new, improved Quarry Men reveled in the possibilities. John, Paul, George—and Colin. They were almost there.

Chapter 7
A Good Little Sideshow

F
or almost a year after George Harrison joined the Quarry Men, living rooms and backyards were, in general, the only venues where the band played gigs. Though local dance halls and “jive hives” actively booked acts to fill the huge demand for live music, they showed little, if any, interest in hiring the boys.

The neglect stemmed from a conventional reflex that went beyond mere talent itself. Despite the shift in influence from skiffle to rock ’n roll, Liverpool still served the forces of vaudeville, and for old-school promoters who governed the scene, its proprieties could not be shouldered aside. Never mind the crazy, foolish-sounding music—
that
they could abide. But disrespect for the past—
never.
They expected the type of slick, showbiz professionalism that had graced stage shows for sixty years, and anything less, any loss of respect, would not be tolerated whatsoever. Of course, this thinking ran contrary to the whole aesthetic of rock ’n roll. The beauty of the music was that it so rudely flouted tradition. Perhaps rock critic Lester Bangs put it best when he suggested that rock was “
nothing but a Wham-O
toy to bash around as you please in the nursery.” It sent up the whole feeble showbiz establishment in a way that was guaranteed to offend the old-timers who worshipped it. In Liverpool, the network of promoters—Brian Kelly, Charlie McBain, Vic Anton, Bill Marsden, Ralph Webster, and Doug Martin, among others—accepted the shift away from more traditional music, but only on their terms, which meant that the beat groups they hired maintained a certain stodgy decorum.
Most wore matching suits
, played a polished set of songs mixed with corny patter, and behaved themselves like perfect gentlemen.

All of which eluded the Quarry Men.

“
John refused to behave
like a trained monkey,” says Nigel Walley. “He’d take a gig seriously, show up on time, and [be] ready to play, but as for someone’s idea of proper behavior, he was having none of it.” John wouldn’t kowtow to promoters who insisted that the band present a hokey stage show. Requests to “tone down the volume” were routinely ignored.

And there were too many other acts who were willing to play by the rules. The same names kept cropping up wherever Nigel tried to land a gig. The Swinging Bluegenes blended jazz and traditional blues into a silky smooth, if innocuous, confection that went down with relative ease. The same with the Mars Bars, fronted by a Scouse sprite named Gerry Marsden, whose twinkly, eager-to-please stage persona reminded many spectators of a docile marionette and whose show packed all the punch of a pub sing-along. Slightly harder-edged, but no less parochial, were the James Boys, who later, as Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, became the resident, or house, band at St. Luke’s Hall, in the suburb of Crosby. Eddie Miles, arguably the best guitarist in Liverpool, launched Eddie Clayton and the Clayton Squares (with his next-door neighbor, a teenager named Richard Starkey) to showcase a “down-home” style session. Cass and the Cassanovas appeared regularly in a “
student joint
” called the Corinthian, where Brian Casser, “an assertive, all-around showman” with a sweet, toothy image, played the type of tame set that required his drummer to use brushes. And Al Caldwell’s Raging Texans, unconvincing as teenage rebels, mined the same rank showmanship that established them a year later as Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
These bands, which became the vanguard
of the Merseybeat phenomenon, along with the Two Jays, the Hi Tones, and half a dozen other beat groups, developed faster, rocked respectfully, and toed the line.

Frustrated by the band’s slow progress, John and Paul concentrated on practicing together every spare moment they got—and lit upon a momentous discovery. Paul, as it happened, mentioned casually that he’d written several songs, and he played John an early effort called “
I Lost My Little Girl
.” The song is an achingly simplistic romantic ballad from the perspective of an uninitiated fourteen-year-old; nevertheless,
John was, in Pete Shotton’s estimation, “floored.”
^*
It is difficult to imagine that writing songs had never occurred to John, although he may have assumed that the effort was beyond him; or it is possible he just never gave it a whirl. There was little precedent for it among British teenagers. At any rate, Paul’s
disclosure set the current flowing and is arguably a pivotal event in modern musical history.

A few years later, people who toured with the Beatles related countless stories about watching John and Paul bang out songs together on a crowded bus or a plane or a van or in the throes of backstage chaos—they could write anywhere and were apparently unself-conscious about it—but by that time the formula was ingrained; they were cranking them out like piecework.

In the spring of 1958, John and Paul exorcised the music that was heard—and shared—in their heads. It was a burst of pure, unconscious energy, and despite all later efforts to perpetuate it, the urgency was no longer there. As John so archly put it: “
You can’t be that hungry twice
.” They had all the tools right at hand: innocence, enthusiasm, desire, opportunity. Between them there was no shortage of imagination or energy. If they lacked anything, it was technique, the musical skills necessary to bring the kind of intricate, unconventional, even intellectual touches to their songs that marked their later work. Their talent was so natural, so unforced and kinetic, that it developed like infant speech. Perhaps they didn’t understand it themselves.

That spring John and Paul gorged themselves on a bumper crop of fresh material, experimenting with lyrical harmonies and a panoply of vocal styles served by their natural abilities. Most of the treatments they tackled were copied faithfully from American records, down to the last marginal lick. Later John urged fans away from such crutches, admonishing them, “
Don’t copy the swimming teacher
, learn how to swim,” but for the time being, imitation prevailed as they jumped from one influence to another, casting around for an identity.

Initially there was an almost obsessive preoccupation with the Everly Brothers, whom the boys adopted as their “
idols
.” They careened from one Everly hit to the next—“Cathy’s Clown,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “So How Come (No One Loves Me)”—including, as Paul noted, “even some of the B sides like ‘So Sad (to Watch Good Love Go Bad).’ ” Their parts were custom-made for impersonation. “
I’d be Phil
and John would be Don,” he explained, recalling the flights of fantasy in which they performed the songs with exaggerated emotion, trying their best to imitate the brothers’ downy harmonies.

Eventually they gravitated to Buddy Holly, whose cadences bore a twangy, albeit double-tracked, similarity. After being sacked from the
Quarry Men, Griff had enlisted in the merchant marine, shipping out immediately to ports in South America and Canada. “
That’s where I picked up
Buddy Holly,” Griffiths says. “I brought his records back to Liverpool [along with Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”], and John and Paul would either buy them off me, or we’d swap.” The attraction wasn’t hard to fathom. Buddy Holly had everything they wanted, everything they’d been struggling to create musically: melodic songs; a crisp, clean sound; impeccable rhythm; unforgettable riffs; and monster appeal. His entire image was suffused with the dreamy romanticism of a small-town success story. Only twenty-two, he conveyed an Everyman presence, with his birdlike face, unfashionable horn-rimmed glasses, and a gawkiness at odds with rock ’n roll stardom. When he sang, his clear, slightly nasal alto, with a hint of the Deep South, carried a message of determination. One song, in particular—“Listen to Me”—presented an enormous challenge. “
We sat around for an entire afternoon
trying to decipher the lyric,” recalls Arthur Kelly. “No one could figure out the line ‘I will love you tenderly,’ because [Holly] phrased it so awkwardly. It drove John nuts: ‘What is it? What
is
it?’ They went through every possible rhyme, matching it to the previous line, before hitting on the proper word.” Eventually, after putting it all together, they worked up a neat little arrangement to go with the rest of Holly’s vibrant repertoire.