John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ Garry shared John’s fondness for music—the ‘pop’ aimed squarely at their parents’ generation—but for neither was it anything resembling a passion. As they cycled around, they would sing out loud, trying to outdo each other in the number of current hit songs they knew and in their skill as impersonators. ‘I was always better at ballads,’ Len says. ‘But John was better at the uptempo stuff. A song he particularly liked was Mitchell Torok’s “Caribbean.” I remember how, even when he was riding against the wind, standing up on his pedals, he always got the timing just right.’

      They had little initial interest, therefore, in the Bill Haley phenomenon, which reached the first of several climaxes during that summer. Michigan-born Haley had been an obscure country-and-western singer until 1951, when he recorded a song called ‘Rock the Joint’, exchanging his usual cowboy yodel for the style and intonation of black rhythm and blues. America’s racial situation being what it was, the disc could be marketed only if no biographical details about Haley were given. His country music public would have been appalled by the idea of a white man singing a ‘negro tune’, while no black listener would have taken the performance seriously.

      Three years later, by now fronting a group named the Comets, Haley recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an exuberant piece of horological nonsense that was already a year old, with one unsuccessful version by black vocalist Sunny Dae on the market. Haley’s reinter-pretation caused equally little stir until added to the soundtrack of The Blackboard Jungle, a film on the timely subject of delinquency in a New York high school. This change in context produced a devastating effect throughout America; wherever Haley’s voice rang out with ‘One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock RAHK…’ the gritty drama on the screen was totally eclipsed by mayhem among the audience. Boys and girls alike went literally berserk, shrieking like banshees, tearing at the fabric of their seats, lurching out to dance in the aisles or engage in mass brawls that required dozens of police to contain them.

      The separate terms rock and roll had always existed in black music as synonyms for rhythm-enhanced sex. Who exactly first joined them together to define the keening saxophone and hand-thwacked double-bass beat of Haley and his Comets can never be known for certain. The most likely contender was a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who billed his show on station WJW as The Moondog Rock ‘n’ Roll Party.

      Britain’s press, to begin with, treated rock ‘n’ roll as merely another bizarre American novelty, like pie-eating contests, pole-squatting or wedding ceremonies at the bottom of swimming pools. The mood changed as it became clear that Teddy Boys—and their scarcely less bizarre and repugnant Teddy Girls—were Haley’s most fanatical converts, and seemingly intent on destroying just as many cinemas as had their American cousins. Screenings of The Blackboard Jungle were cancelled wholesale, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was banished both from radio and television, and dance halls banned the jitterbuggy dance that went with it. The result was as might have been expected: Haley’s record shot to number one in the Top 20 in May 1955, remaining on the chart for 22 weeks. The following October, it made number one again, and stayed on the chart a further 17 weeks.

      With hindsight, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ looks like a kind of Phoney War—a warm-up for the cultural blitzkrieg soon to follow. Most of the excitement it generated was damped down by the sight of Bill Haley himself, a man already pushing 30, with a cherubic smile and query-shaped kiss curl on his too-high forehead, who looked little different from the parents who so condemned him.

      To capitalize on sales of the ‘Rock Around the Clock’ recording, a film of the same name was rushed out, featuring Haley and the Comets with other emergent rock-’n’-roll celebrities like Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, the Platters, and ‘Moondog’ Alan Freed. John went to see it expecting a life-changing experience but came away disappointed. ‘I was very surprised’. he would recall. ‘Nobody was screaming and nobody was dancing in the aisles like I’d read. I was all set to tear up the seats, too, but nobody joined in.’

      As if to prove the fad had done no serious harm, John’s school report for the 1955 summer term was considerably less of a disaster than usual. English: ‘He is capable of good work and has done quite well…a good knowledge of the books.’ History: ‘He has tried hard and worked well.’ Art: ‘Very satisfactory.’ Handwork: ‘Satisfactory progress.’ Physical training: ‘(height 5, 6 and a half, weight 9 st, 4 lbs) F[airly] satisfactory.’ Geography: ‘Undoubtedly trying harder.’ General science: ‘An encouraging result. His work has been satisfactory but his behaviour in class is not always so.’ The only wholly negative entries were for French (’disappointing’ through fondness for ‘obtaining a cheap laugh in class’) and Religious Knowledge (‘His work has been of a low standard’).

      ‘The best report he has had for a long time,’ noted a surprised Ernie Taylor in the space reserved for headmaster’s comment. ‘I hope this means that he has turned over a new leaf.’

       5 THE GALLOTONE CHAMPION

      Please God, give me a guitar.

      He first heard about Elvis Presley from a Quarry Bank classmate named Don Beatty, one of the participants in the Great Dinner Tickets Swindle. Don had a copy of the New Musical Express—at that time rather a rarity in the northwest—and pointed out a reference to America’s newest rock-’n’-roll sensation and his just-released new record, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

      John reacted guardedly at first, remembering what a letdown Rock Around the Clock had been. ‘The music papers were saying Presley was fantastic, and at first I expected someone like Perry Como or Sinatra. “Heartbreak Hotel” sounded a corny title, and his name seemed strange in those days. But then when I heard it, it was the end for me…I remember rushing home with the record and saying “He sounds like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray and Tennessee Ernie Ford.” ’

      When Presley erupted into popular music and mythology that spring of 1956, he was by no means the first entertainer to cause mass hysteria. During the 1920s, the silent screen idol Rudolf Valentino and the prototype crooner Rudy Vallee had each driven female audiences to frenzy—Vallee earning the nickname of ‘the guy with the cock in his voice’, Valentino attracting a screaming crowd of 10,000 even to his funeral. Two decades later, the young Frank Sinatra inspired a whole new species of female worshipper, the ‘bobbysoxer’, whose demented reactions at concerts ultimately competed in newsworthiness with the singer himself. Nor was such incontinence purely emotional: after Sinatra’s legendary opening at the New York Paramount Theater in 1947, it was found that many bobby-soxers, unable to contain themselves, had urinated where they sat.

      All this was taken to uncharted new levels, however, by a 21-year-old former truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee, with dyed black hair and the face of a supercilious baby. For Presley did more than touch the trigger of feminine mass fantasy; he also gave release to the tension that had built up in young men with no more global conflict to burn off their testosterone. Here, rolled into one person, was a Valentino with a voice, a Sinatra with still greater power over young girls’ bladders, a James Dean in close-up more mesmeric than even Hollywood could contrive—in short, a rock-’n’-roll hero who looked every bit as gloriously disruptive as he sounded. The Phoney War of tarten jackets, soppy smiles and kiss curls was over: all-out bombardment had finally begun.

      For the vast majority of Britons, Presley could not have been more incomprehensible if freshly beamed down from Mars. Bill Haley at least had a name that was recognisably human (one he happened to share with the current editor of The Times). But ‘Elvis Presley’ was the strangest configuration of syllables yet to have crossed the Atlantic—more so than Joe DiMaggio, Efrem Zimbalist Jr or even Liberace, which some newspapers felt obliged to render СКАЧАТЬ