The Beatles (27 page)

For all his nurturing, Paul couldn’t fill the void. John wasn’t ready to accept any kind of social comforting. As John was to later remark: “
I lost [my mother] twice
. Once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie. And once again at fifteen [sic] when she actually, physically died.” He had never felt more detached in his life, or with more need for some reinforcement. And yet, though Paul was prepared to strengthen their intimacy as friends, John wanted no part of it. He wanted to be angry for a while.

Dejected and resentful, John passed the remainder of the summer largely in solitude. For the first time in several years,
he didn’t go to visit his cousin
Stanley in Scotland. Instead, he sulked in his room at Menlove Avenue, refusing to see visitors. When friends showed up unannounced, Mimi met them at the door with a disapproving glare and turned them away. Even Paul and George saw little of their bandleader, and on the few occasions when they lured him out to practice, there was no real enthusiasm. Songwriting especially became a struggle. The five or six tunes he and Paul managed to finish were bright, upbeat, and romantic—hardly reflective of John’s dark mood, and there is no doubt as to who was chiefly responsible for them. Neither boy ever claimed there was parity in producing their material, or pretended otherwise. In the course of their extraordinary collaboration, John and Paul routinely worked alone on songs before putting their heads together. In this case,
Paul provided the basic structure
for “Love Me Do,” a catchy and direct, albeit innocuous, song whose plodding lyric does nothing to revive the melody’s stunted hook. The writing has few of the stylized nuances—the elliptical rhythmic twists and inflections—that give contour to their later songs. Paul had tinkered with “Love Me Do” for some time before bringing it respectfully to John for a polish, but it never evinced the spirit that a studio production ultimately gave it. As for “
P.S. I Love You
,” with its playful admission of vulnerability, Paul noted: “It was pretty much mine. I don’t think John had much of a hand in it.”

When school started again, there was a noticeable shift in the group’s balance. Creatively, physically, emotionally, John was coming apart at the
seams. He had begun drinking heavily, as though determined to drown his anguish in self-abuse. Night after night,
in a room at Ye Cracke
, he downed beer and whiskey until he could barely stand. Straddling a low-backed chair, he plunged into soul-searching conversations with strangers, punctuating them with explosions of anxious rage. Most nights,
John was “very entertaining
… inclined to talk about the bum of a girl or tell funny stories about somebody sitting across the room.” But he could very quickly turn nasty. Boundaries were drawn and redrawn without any warning. If old friends stopped by the pub, they avoided him because, sometimes, John seemed determined to drive them away, determined to abandon them as his mother had abandoned him. On one occasion, barely sober, John began egging on “
some blokes… prancing about
, doing ballet steps” in front of the old police station on Renshaw Street, when he finally pushed the wrong button and they “butted him in the face.” Another time, undoubtedly drunk, he picked an unanticipated fight with his dear art school mate Jonathan Hague, for whom he had nothing but the fondest feelings. “He got my duffel coat up over my head and started flailing away,” Hague remembers. “It actually didn’t mean a thing to me; I was too drunk. But the next day in school, in a very shaky, frightened way, John told me that he was trying to kill the person under the coat and didn’t understand the anger in him to do such a thing.”

Faced with trying to keep things vital, Paul took over as “the motivator,” calling rehearsals, then persuading John to attend. He even moved their location from his house in Allerton to Menlove Avenue in an effort to engage Lennon, but with little success. A friend who attended those practices observed: “
John could just as easily
have gone over to the golf course across the road for a walk, or gone to town.” He was that uninterested. It was no different at school. John was enrolled, but in name only. He attended classes but hardly participated in any work; nothing lit a fire under him, no tutor came to his rescue.

One of the band’s few joys that semester was playing at the art school dances, which were held intermittently on Friday nights in the basement canteen. Unlike the “fancy-dress dos” that marked the college’s social rituals, the dances were “
crowded, informal affairs
, pitch-black and sweaty.” For those dances, the band shelved its trusty Quarry Men moniker, probably to dissociate themselves from being identified as grammar-school boys. “They were simply [known as] ‘the college band,’ ” says Harry. And it wasn’t much of a band, at that. There was no drummer, for starters; inexplicably, Colin Hanton hadn’t been summoned to play for the two
initial college functions. Whether the band considered him expendable or he had fallen from their good graces remains unclear. But his relationship with the other boys, while cordial, was never that comfortable. He wasn’t one of the “
inner bunch
,” he wasn’t “
an anchorman
,” and, what’s more, he had a full-time day job as an upholsterer that would always take precedence over music. In all probability, however, their distancing came down to talent: John, Paul, and George were getting better as the band grew tighter—and Colin wasn’t. After a gig at the Pavilion Theatre, in Lodge Lane—
where Julia Lennon had once danced
professionally in a theater troupe—things went from great to gone. The management was looking for a regular band to play a half-hour set of music between each bingo session.
As Nigel Walley had explained it
, the residency was the Quarry Men’s to lose: an entertaining show that night would seal the deal.

To everyone’s great relief, the band cruised through an energetic, very satisfying set. As they were leaving the stage, the announcer wandered over and said, “That was very good. There’s a pint for you at the bar, lads.”

One pint, however, led to two, then three. “
Aside from George
,” recalls Hanton, “Paul, John, and I got pretty well drunk.” Slowly but steadily, they got plastered on black velvets—a bottle of Guinness mixed with a half-pint of cider. “
By the time we had to go on
again, we were totally out of it,” George recalled. Any effort to contain the damage backfired. With the impact of yet another setback, Paul exploded. All the repressed anger—from months of not playing regularly, tiptoeing around John’s depression, and putting out a cheesy, half-assed sound—pressed in on him. As they headed home, in a rage, Paul turned on Colin Hanton, whose ineffectiveness Paul blamed for dragging the band down. Hanton was a wiry, little guy, not much over five foot four, but absolutely fearless, and he refused to take crap from any slick, “mealy-mouth” grammar-school boy.

Pete Shotton, who had met the band at the hall, stepped between the fuming antagonists. He glanced furtively outside; the bus had just crossed Queen’s Drive. Without taking his eyes off Paul, he said, “C’mon, Colin, this is our stop.” Breathing heavily, Hanton turned and went downstairs to get his drums. Pete helped him drag the equipment home, then left, saying he’d see Colin soon, most likely at the next gig. But there was no next gig, and no phone call from any of the Quarry Men. “In fact, I never saw them again,” Hanton says, “until three years later, when I turned on the telly and some bloke was going on about a band called the Beatles.”

Chapter 9
Chalk and Cheese

T
here was no eulogy for the Quarry Men—no tears shed, no postmortem. It was never actually acknowledged by anyone that they’d disbanded. But if they weren’t officially “done with,” the group was nonetheless in deep freeze. Without any gigs, there was nothing to keep them in action. Helplessly, they sat idle while the local rave scene grew up and around them, never reaching out an inviting hand.

Adrift, George, Paul, and John spent many nights at the Rialto, listening to and studying Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, whose transformation from catchy skiffle to a set heavily influenced by American rhythm and blues awakened the young bands in Liverpool. They also kept an eye trained on Alan Caldwell, who had emerged from his skiffly torpor with an intriguing persona to go with a flashy new sound. Jet (later, Rory) Storm and the Hurricanes were slick and soul-stirring, and they took advantage of the need for some pure entertainment in an idiom suffused with raw energy. Storm, a star athlete, was incredibly handsome and brimming with confidence—or at least appeared to be, with a hundred-watt smile he toggled on and off to the delight of his fans. Tall and reed-thin, with “
peroxide-blond hair
,” he went to dancing class to refine certain theatrics and wore either gold lamé or peacock blue suits onstage as a means of commanding the spotlight. He spent hours before a show choosing a wardrobe. And if clothes didn’t make the man, he simply removed them, once “
stripping down to a tiny bikini
string thing before prancing about to the music.” A friend says, “
He would do
anything
to get attention on the stage.” Even a pet monkey was drafted into the act “
because it had excellent pulling power
.” Storm’s voice was flimsy at best, and Johnny Byrne, a natural lead guitarist—Ringo called him “Liverpool’s Jimi Hendrix”—was deaf in one ear and played incredibly loud. But when the lights hit them and the
music kicked in, there was magic in their performance. Howie Casey, who played sax for a rival band, the Seniors, and found himself frequently paired on the same bill, marveled at the Hurricanes’ “big stage act.” Recalling it fondly, he says, “
When the lights came up
, all the guitarists had a foot up on their [cream-and-red Selmer] amps, their backs turned to the audience. And when they started to play, [Caldwell] would come swinging on and they’d turn around on cue. It was very sharp, very bold. No one else, in 1958, was doing anything remotely like that.” More than any movie or record, this band’s stage presence left an indelible mark on the Beatles.

Everywhere the former Quarry Men looked, the rock ’n roll bandwagon was rumbling ahead, picking up steam. Teenage venues opened as fast as promoters could find vacant buildings or church halls to rent. The Dominoes and the Hurricanes worked four or five times a week, and one only had to open a newspaper to glimpse lists of regular “
big beat dances
” featuring young bands like Ian and the Zodiacs, Dale Roberts and the Jaywalkers, the Swinging Bluegenes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Cass and the Cassanovas.

Quietly, George attempted to join Storm’s tony outfit, showing up at his West Oakhill Park house one afternoon in a bid to audition for the band. Vi Caldwell, a blunt, outspoken woman who steered her son’s career with fastidiousness, dismissed George as if he were a child. “
I told him he was too young
,” she reported to her son and Johnny Byrne, both of whom were having tea in the kitchen. But George’s appearance there confirmed something that up till then Byrne had only suspected. He turned to Storm and said, “It seems the Quarry Men are done with.”

By the end of 1958, George’s itch to play was so strong that he took up with three other friends—Ken Brown, Les Stewart, and a lad known only as Skinner—in a rather pedestrian unit called the Les Stewart Quartet.
Mostly, they just rehearsed
together in the Lowlands, a coffee bar in a residential section of town, but eventually some work dribbled their way. Limited to the outer fringe of the rock ’n roll scene, they concentrated on gigs held at “
working-men’s clubs
[which] never paid… more than ten bob” and the occasional wedding reception.

Harry and Louise continued to encourage George’s musical interests, although (like most parents) they had grown leery of John Lennon’s influence over their son. John had always been welcome at the Harrisons’ house; Louise, especially, treated him with warmth and jollity, playing the giddy hostess and feeding him endless helpings of beans and toast, a Scouse favorite that Mimi refused to make. But as the year wore on and his behavior
grew more erratic—and more terrifying—even Louise was forced to reconsider her opinion.

“
By December, he was completely out of control
,” recalls Jonathan Hague, who continued to drink and carouse with John almost every night that fall. “We had learned to drink together, but somewhere along the way he left me in the dust.” Hague attributes John’s excess to rage, which crept over him unexpectedly, like the dense Liverpool fog. “He seemed to be consumed by anger at that stage. He was jealous of other students, resentful about his mother’s death, and frustrated—trapped—by his situation at school. He was clearly mixed up—just lost—with no one willing or able to help him.”

John always struck where he knew people would be most vulnerable, “mimicking their accents or a particular disfigurement,” according to Hague. There are countless stories about how John pulled up limping alongside a cripple or insisted on shaking hands with an armless veteran. “
Most of his antics
were harsh—but harmless,” says an art school classmate. But more than once, a sharp-eyed art student had to rescue John from an imminent beating, or buy a couple of pints for “an enraged neighbor” he’d insulted, as goodwill. Helen Anderson says that “
he was embarrassingly rude
to people, hurling insults at them, telling them to fuck off. It was terrible. Most of us eventually got fed up with him.”