John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ exception when Paul began joking around in John’s ‘spastic talk’—‘thik ik unk’, and so on. After a heated exchange, he jumped up, rang the bell one stop too early, piled his drums off the bus, and never showed up for another performance.

      John was thus left alone with his two schoolboy sidemen Paul and George—a matchless combination one of these days, but back in British rock-’n’-roll’s Ice Age an unmitigated catastrophe. For without a drummer, however indifferent, three acoustic guitarists, however resourceful, could not hope to be taken seriously as a live group. Without the underpinning beat of bass pedal, snare and tom-tom, their songs did not qualify as rock, merely a form of jumped-up skiffle or folk that in the average riotous Liverpool hall would have to fight even to be heard. They put a brave face on it, and approached several promoters for work as a non-percussive trio, but from each one came the same brusque query: ‘What about your rhythm?’ John’s hopefully reassuring reply of ‘The rhythm’s in the guitars’ was the cue for slammed doors all over town.

      One that remained slightly ajar led to a place he had previously thought an impregnable bastion of anti-rock-’n’-roll prejudice. Stu Sutcliffe and Bill Harry both sat on the entertainments committee of the art college’s student union, and managed to talk down the trad jazz zealots sufficiently to get the Quarrymen occasional bookings for college dances. At Stu’s and Bill’s prompting, the committee also voted funds to buy an amplifier, officially for the use of all visiting entertainers but in practice so that John, Paul and George could give the rhythm in their guitars some extra bite.

      The college provided only occasional gigs, for negligible payment, and John, at least, took them with not much more seriousness than public rehearsals. One day, Helen Anderson had to give him a bright yellow cable-stitch sweater she was wearing when he hadn’t bothered to put together a stage outfit for that evening’s show. In exchange, he gave her his Quarry Bank exercise book, with its carefully indexed cartoons of ‘Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon’, ‘Smell-type Smith’ and the rest.

      Times became so slow for the Quarrymen that George Harrison took to sitting in with other small-scale groups, in particular one called the Les Stewart Quartet, who appeared regularly at the Lowlands coffee bar. George’s defection looked to become permanent when the Stewart Quartet were offered a residency at a club named the Casbah, which was about to open in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby. It belonged to an attractive, dark-eyed woman named Mona Best, whose husband, Johnny, had for many years been Liverpool’s main boxing promoter. At the outset it was not intended as a serious business venture, simply a meeting place for Mrs Best’s sons Rory and Peter and their friends in the basement of their rambling Victorian home in Hayman’s Green. But on the eve of opening night, 28 August, the quartet broke up in acrimony, and Mrs Best asked George if he knew any musicians who could take their place. He volunteered himself, John and Paul.

      The Casbah’s opening saw John graduate at last from the vermilion Gallotone Champion guitar (‘Guaranteed not to split’) that his mother had bought two years previously. In August, he persuaded Mimi to stake him to a Hofner Club 40 semi-solid model (i.e., playable both acoustically and electrically) with a fawn-coloured cutaway body, a black scratchplate and an impressive cluster of tone- and volume-control knobs. The trip they made to collect it from Hessy’s in Whitechapel would be enshrined in Mimi’s memory as buying him his first guitar for the—to her—hefty sum of £17. In fact, that was merely a down payment: the Club 40’s retail price was £28 7s, which instalment-plan charges (supposedly to be met by John) increased to £30 9s.

      John, Paul and George played at the Casbah for seven successive Saturday nights, still billed as the Quarrymen and augmented by a fourth guitarist named Ken Brown, a member of the disbanded Les Stewart Quartet. The club proved an instant hit, attracting such crowds that Mrs Best had to hire a doorman to back up her own formidable presence behind the snack and soft drinks bar. West Derby’s weekly paper did a story headlined ‘Kasbah [sic] Has New Meaning for Local Teenagers’, accompanied by the first-ever press picture of John in performance with the new Club 40, supporting its cutaway body on one white-trousered knee and clearly glorying in his power to reach the topmost notes on the fretboard.

      Among the Saturday-night regulars was Dorothy (Dot) Rhone, a petite 16-year-old from Childwall, whom John took to calling Bubbles, even though her hair didn’t have so much as a ringlet. Dot was drawn to his ’rugged’ looks the moment she set eyes on him but, learning that he already had a steady girlfriend, agreed to go out with Paul McCartney instead. Despite her extraordinary cuteness, she was even milder than Cynthia Powell and submitted without protest to the same rules from Paul that John imposed on Cyn—total adoration, fidelity, availability and revising her appearance and wardrobe to look as much as possible like Brigitte Bardot. ‘Paul was always supposed to be the charming one, but John was more compassionate,’ she remembers. ‘When Paul and I had a row, he’d often tell Paul to be nicer to me.’

      In Mona Best’s happy combination of club and Enid Blytonish secret den, the Quarrymen seemed to have found an ideal home. Mrs Best made them part of her family circle, frequently inviting them upstairs for cups of tea or meals in the rambling house, which was crammed with exotic mementos of her Indian upbringing. They grew particularly friendly with her younger son, Peter, a strikingly handsome 18-year-old whose reserved manner and crisply styled hair earned him frequent comparison with the film star Jeff Chandler.

      Then, on the Saturday night of 10 October, everything suddenly turned sour. Ken Brown, the new fourth Quarryman, reported for duty with a bad cold. In her matriarchal fashion, Mrs Best decided he wasn’t well enough to play and sent him upstairs to sit in the warm with her elderly mother. At the evening’s end, however, she still gave him his quarter share of the Quarrymen’s £3 fee. John, Paul and George protested that, as Brown hadn’t performed, he shouldn’t be paid; when Mrs. Best stood firm, the three of them walked out in a huff.

      However John might blag about the rhythm being ‘in the guitars’, it was clear that if his group was to go on playing anywhere outside the art college’s basement, they had to find a drummer to replace Colin Hanton. But the task seemed a hopeless one. All the good players around were already comfortably ensconced in prestigious groups like Cass and the Cassanovas or Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, where their personalities as well as percussive showmanship often proved as great a draw as the singers. The Cassanovas had upholsterer John Hutchinson, aka Johnny Hutch, a famous tough guy known to hit equally hard whether the skin in question covered drum or human jaw. The Hurricanes had Ritchie Starkey, a sad-eyed boy from the tougher-than-tough Dingle area whose love of flashy finger ornamentation had led him to adopt the stage name Ringo Starr.

      Musical nobodies John, Paul and George might be, yet they still had the chutzpah to enter their names against the cream of Liverpool’s drummer-enhanced groups when heats for another Carroll Levis ‘Nationwide Search for a Star’ competition was held at the Liverpool Empire. To camouflage the drummer problem, they appeared as a vocal trio with John in the centre, minus guitar, resting one hand on Paul’s shoulder and one on George’s. It was an effective and rather daring idea, since Paul’s and George’s left-and right-handed guitar necks pointed neatly in opposite directions, and physical contact between young males, onstage or off, was still taboo.

      The need to pull out something special for Carroll Levis also finally extinguished that tired old skiffle handle, the Quarrymen. For days beforehand, John and Paul racked their brains for a new name with an American lilt that hadn’t already been taken by some other group, national or local. Their final choice was a nod to a currently successful US instrumental act, Johnny and the Hurricanes, and also to rock ‘n’ roll’s founding father, Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed. When they took the stage for their first heat at the Empire, it was as Johnny and the Moondogs.

      They performed two Buddy Holly songs, ‘Think It Over’ and ‘Rave On’, with enough panache to reach the area semi-finals at the Hippodrome theatre in Manchester on Sunday, 15 November. As with John’s previous Carroll Levis experience, the winners СКАЧАТЬ