John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ its large back room to Rod. This made Rod and Stu’s first-floor studio-cum-bedsit more regularly available as a refuge for John and Cynthia. She would tell her mother she was staying with her college friend, Phyllis McKenzie; he would tell Mimi he was sleeping over with one of the Quarrymen after a late gig.

      Although Cynthia showed John nothing but devotion, he became increasingly possessive and insecure. She had only to smile at another boy in the most casual, friendly way to throw him into anguished fantasies that it might be some kind of secret code for an affair in progress or about to begin. At one college hop, he punched a fellow student who’d merely asked her to dance. As they sat together, he would hold on tightly to her hand, as if afraid she might fly away at any moment. Cynthia later said that he often showed symptoms of a nervous breakdown—a diagnosis with which John himself later concurred. ‘I demanded absolute trust[worthiness] from her because I wasn’t trustworthy myself. I was neurotic, taking out all my frustrations on her.’

      In these days, it was still considered quite normal for men of every stamp—and northern ones above all—to keep ‘their’ women in line by physical chastisement if and when they saw fit. ‘As a teenager all I saw were films where men beat up women,’ John would recall. ‘That was tough, that was the thing to do, slap them in the face, treat them rough, Humphrey Bogart and all that jazz…’ Cynthia’s autobiography, A Twist of Lennon, published in 1977, made no mention of having suffered physical abuse from him. Some 20 years later in a BBC documentary, she recounted how, one night when she was not seeing John, she and Phyllis McKenzie had gone to an out-of-town club and afterwards been given a lift home by two boys they had met. Next day at college, she mentioned the innocent episode to John. Phyllis then described finding her in tears after he’d ‘slapped her face’.

      Cynthia’s second autobiography, published in 2005, had a harsher story to relate. One evening at a party, John ‘went mad’ after someone told him she was dancing with Stu Sutcliffe. They stopped as soon as they saw the look on his face, and Cyn hastened to mollify him. The next day, however, he followed her down to the ladies’ toilets in the college basement. When she came out, he hit her across the face so hard that her head struck a heating pipe on the wall; John then walked off without a word. As a result, she chucked him, and they stayed apart for three months until John persuaded her to take him back. Even according to this score-settling account, he was never again physically violent to her.

      Summer of 1959 brought the multi-part exam that Intermediate students had to pass before moving on to their chosen speciality. Despite his dismal past performance in almost all the areas covered by the exam, John managed to scrape through. Well-wishers and not-so-well-wishers alike rallied round to help him make up the deficiencies of the past five terms. Stu Sutcliffe gave him a crash course in basic painting skills, devoting night after night to the task in an empty lecture room, while Cynthia waited patiently at an adjacent desk.

      As well as taking the exam, he was required to submit course work in the form of paintings or drawings. ‘The trouble was, he hadn’t done anything like enough,’ Ann Mason remembers. One day, while I was going through my stuff with Arthur Ballard, I saw John standing there, looking a bit despondent. So I offered him some of my drawings to put in for the exam. I wondered if I’d get one of his tongue-lashings, but he just said “Oh, yeah…great!”’ Both Cynthia and Thelma Pickles would also later recall making similar contributions to his portfolio.

      The college had just inaugurated a Department of Commercial Design, for which the polymathic Bill Harry was already bound. To Ballard, it seemed the obvious place to develop John’s talent for cartooning and satire. Because of his reputation as a troublemaker, however, the department head, Roy Sharpe, refused to accept him. A fuming Ballard retorted that Sharpe would be better off ‘teaching in a Sunday school’.

      The college’s only alternative was to put John into the Painting School alongside Stu Sutcliffe, tacitly hoping that over the next two years Stu’s talent, energy and dedication might prove to be contagious.

      In March 1958, Elvis Presley had been drafted into the US Army, the glorious inky billows of his hair planed to the scalp, his blue suede shoes traded for heavy-duty boots, the inimitable name rendered down to a mere serial number, the insolent flaunt of his crotch replaced by a stiff-backed salute.

      ‘The King’ was the greatest but by no means only loss to rock-’n’-roll’s barely erected pantheon. In February 1959, Buddy Holly was killed when his chartered plane crashed on a tour of the snowbound American Midwest, so leaving thousands of British boys—John among them—bereft of a friend whose speaking voice they had never heard, wondering where their next lesson in how to play rock music would come from. Yet just before his death, Holly, too, had apparently decided to move on from rock ‘n’ roll; his final recordings were thoughtful ballads, with his backing group, the Crickets, replaced by a string orchestra.

      On every hand, deities that once had flashed and thundered invulnerably from the heavens now seemed to be plummeting to earth. During a 1957 Australian tour, Little Richard had seen Russia’s Sputnik space satellite flash through the night sky and interpreted it as a personal summons to him from God. Symbolically throwing a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbour, he had given up singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and begun training for the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been hounded out of Britain when it emerged that he was bigamously married to his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gayle. Chuck Berry had been arrested on immorality charges connected with a teenage waitress, for which he would eventually receive two years’ imprisonment.

      In the UK, however, rock was suffering no such vertiginous decline. Performers like Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and the Everly Brothers, who had become yesterday’s men in their homeland, continued to release records and play concerts in Britain—and across Europe—and be welcomed there as rapturously as ever. Britain also by now had its own fledgling rock-’n’-roll scene, which gained in strength and confidence as its American exemplar lost heart.

      One British city, above all, devotedly kept the rock-’n’-roll flame alive. In Liverpool, dozens of scrubby skiffle groups of yesteryear had metamorphosed into rock combos whose names combined unalloyed Yank-worship with native humour and wordplay: Karl Terry and the Cruisers, Derry and the Seniors (a play on America’s Danny and the Juniors), Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Silhouettes, the Four Jays, the Bluegenes. Several of the groups were far more than mere Buddy Holly copyists, featuring pianos and saxes like the ‘rockin’ bands’ behind Little Richard and Larry (‘Bony Moronie’) Williams.

      At the bottom of the heap, so far down that few people even knew they existed, were John Lennon and the Quarrymen. Indeed, despite all the shaping-up that had gone on since Paul’s arrival, there was serious doubt if they would last very far into 1959. 1 January found them back onstage at Wilson Hall, playing for the overdue Christmas party of the Garston bus depot’s social club. The booking had came through George Harrison’s bus-driver father, who in his spare time acted as the club’s entertainments secretary and compère. Harry Harrison had also persuaded the manager of a nearby cinema, The Pavilion, to drop by and catch their act with a view to giving them further work in the future.

      ‘To start with, everything went really well,’ drummer Colin Hanton remembers. ‘We were even given our own dressing-room to rehearse and tune up in. The act went over great—all the bus-drivers and clippies [conductors] really dug us. When they tried to draw the stage curtains after our first set, something went wrong with the mechanism, and the curtains wouldn’t pull. John made a joke about it to the audience, which got a big laugh, and we played an extra number while the problem was sorted out. When we came offstage, feeling really pleased with ourselves, we were told “There’s a pint for each of you lads at the bar.” We ended up having more than just a pint, so for our second set we were pissed out of our minds, all except George—and we were terrible.’

      The СКАЧАТЬ