John Lennon: The Life (17 page)

Stu was the same age as John but had arrived at college from Prescot Grammar School a year earlier. He was far and away the
most talented student in the place, gifted with a seemingly effortless mastery of every medium he touched, drawing, painting, or sculpture. He was also phenomenally energetic, filling canvases and sketchbooks with work of a maturity that dazzled his instructors, then hurtling on to the next thing almost before they had time to articulate their praise. Small and feminine featured, with luxuriant backswept hair, he was often likened to the short-lived screen idol James Dean—a comparison that would prove all too sadly appropriate. In fact, the dark glasses he often wore denoted a more obscure role-model, Zbigniew Cybulski, protégé of the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and sometimes called “the James Dean of Poland.”

Stu functioned on an altogether more grown-up level than John. Though his Scottish middle-class parents lived in Liverpool, he had a flat in Percy Street, which he shared with his close friend Rod Murray. Recognizing him to be in a class of his own, the college let him do much of his work there also. His main tutor, the tolerant Arthur Ballard, would drop by regularly to see him, bringing half a bottle of whiskey for refreshment, but seldom made any effort to control the roaring flood of his creativity.

John met Stu through Bill Harry, another fellow student destined to play a significant role in his later life. Bill, in fact, was the archetypal working-class hero, having fought his way to college from an impoverished childhood in Parliament Street, near the docks, where wartime bomb rubble remained still uncleared and terrifying mobs with names like the Chain Gang and the Peanut Gang ruled the neighborhood. A compulsive reader, writer, cartoonist, organizer, and entrepreneur, he found few kindred spirits apart from Stu and Rod Murray in a student body he considered largely time-wasting “dilettanti.”

Bill discovered that John shared his own interest in writing and, at Ye Cracke one lunchtime, asked to read some of his work. Diffidently murmuring something about “a poem,” John pulled two bedraggled sheets of paper from his jeans pocket and handed them over. Bill expected the standard teenage knock-off of Byron or the American Beats; instead, he found himself reading a Goonish pastiche of
The Archers
, BBC radio’s agricultural drama, that made him guffaw out loud.

John, as it happened, already knew about Stu Sutcliffe, and was more than happy for Bill Harry to introduce them formally at Ye Cracke, under the distracted gaze of the dying Lord Nelson. “If John ever thought anything or anyone was really good,” Rod Murray remembers, “he turned into a completely different person. Much quieter, more thoughtful…ready to talk seriously about serious things. And he thought Stu was
really
good.”

The admiration was by no means all on one side. Along with other diverse subject matter, Stu also enjoyed cartooning, as did Bill Harry. To John’s amazement, both of them heaped praise on his drawings for technique as well as wit, comparing him with Saul Steinberg, whose whimsical, perspectiveless covers for
The New Yorker
magazine they had found in the college library. Suddenly, John was being taken seriously by the most talented artist on his horizon.

Stu’s sister Pauline—in later life a respected therapist—thinks it hard to overrate the redemptive effect of this. “John had a desperate quest for a certain kind of nurturing. Stuart’s nurturing was unconditional…. He loved him. And John recognized that Stuart believed in him…that he believed he wasn’t just a mad, destructive anarchist, but was somebody of worth. Stuart freed John’s own creative spirit.”

John in effect led a double life at college, reflecting the two utterly different sides of his personality. For every drunken foray with Jeff Mohammed there would be a long, serious talk with Stu Sutcliffe, together with Bill Harry and Rod Murray or tête-à-tête. In common with only a few visual artists, Stu could verbalize his aims and intentions, and possessed intellectual curiosity outside his own field. At the time he met John, his personal reading list included Turgenev, Benvenuto Cellini, Herbert Read, Osbert Sitwell, and James Joyce. He was also heavily into Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher who first said that in an irrational world, truth can only be subjective and individual. “We’d sit around for hours, asking, ‘Who are we? Why are we here? What are we for?’” Bill remembers. It was from Stu that John first heard about Dadaism, the principle—to be so spectacularly demonstrated by his future second wife—that no subject matter is too shocking or absurd to deserve
the name of art. “Without Stu Sutcliffe,” Arthur Ballard said, “John wouldn’t have known Dada from a donkey.”

For John, the most surprising and winning aspect of this pint-size powerhouse was that he had nothing to do with the college’s dominant trad jazz crowd but, on the contrary, had adored rock ’n’ roll from its beginning. And already its unhinged sounds and tawdry glitter were firing his imagination as potently as anything from the Renaissance or the French Impressionists. Among his early paintings was an abstract entitled “Elvis Presley,” clearly influenced by Picasso’s
Guitar Player
, executed in garish jukebox colors and spotted with names of Presley songs, “Blue Moon [of Kentucky],” “Hound Dog,” and “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Another prescient belief shared by Stu, Bill, Rod, and now John, was that the city to which they belonged was unique in Britain—in the whole world—and deserved to be celebrated in art and culture just as American Beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso had enshrined San Francisco. As regular attendees of poetry readings at Liverpool University, they disliked the way that almost all young contemporary British poets seemed to have fallen under the Beats’ spell. They agreed to form a four-man society called the Dissenters (an echo of William Brown’s many secret societies) to uphold Liverpool’s own native idiom against these outside invaders: Stu and Rod would do it through art, Bill through writing, and John through music.

N
ow more than a year old, the Quarrymen still idled along under their obsolete name, mixing the death rattles of skiffle with already dated rock-’n’-roll classics and the latest easy-to-follow blueprint helpfully lobbed across the Atlantic by Buddy Holly.

The first months of 1958 brought further personnel changes. Once Paul was sure of his own position, he had begun enthusing to John about the guitar-mad Liverpool Institute boy with whom he used to travel to school by bus each day when the McCartneys still lived in Speke. The crucial defining mark of a rock combo was a lead guitarist playing instrumental breaks aside from the collective strum. Paul suggested that his schoolmate George Harrison might suit this role.

In contrast with the class ambiguities surrounding John (and, to a lesser degree, Paul), there was never any doubt about George’s place in the social scale. His father, Harry, was a Liverpool Corporation bus driver, hardworking, respectable, and entirely comfortable with his station. Born in February 1943, George had spent infant years in the Liverpool from which Mimi had so thankfully rescued John, where homes stood claustrophobically side-to-side and back-to-back, linked by cobbled lanes known as jiggers; where the toilet was an outdoor shed, and the only way to have a bath was in a zinc tub before the kitchen fire.

George was an unlikely convert to rock ’n’ roll—a serious, taciturn boy who hated many of the enforced intimacies of his working-class background and had an almost phobic abhorrence of “nosey neighbours.” With this earnest nature went an acute sense of style and a refusal to conform that, in its quiet way, was almost the equal of John’s. While other boy skifflers were content merely to strum in A or E, George applied himself to mastering the single-string solos that more experienced players automatically assumed to be far out of reach. He also owned a spectacular guitar: a cello-style Hofner President with what the catalog termed a “brunette sunburst finish” and a cutaway shoulder, for reaching the high notes at the base of the fretboard.

Paul’s selling of George to John was a more protracted affair than Paul’s own by Ivan Vaughan had been. For some time he was merely another Quarrymen follower, one of a not overlarge constituency, whose pale, unsmiling face could often be seen near the stage-front at Wilson Hall before all chance of serious musical appreciation was terminated by belt-lashing Teds. Formal introductions were finally made—so drummer Colin Hanton remembers—at an illegal club called the Morgue in the basement of an old house in Oakhill Park. By way of audition, George played “Raunchy,” a bass-string instrumental that was currently a hit for Sun Records’ producer Bill Justis. On the evidence of that and other bass-note workouts like “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” not to mention his splendiferous Hofner President, there seemed every reason for the Quarrymen to haul him on board before some other group did.

The objection was that George was still not quite fifteen and, despite his carefully poised coiffure and ultrasharp clothes, looked barely old enough to be out alone at night. The nine-month age difference between Paul and him was just about tolerable, as was the eighteen-month one between Paul and John. But John was George’s senior by almost two and a half years. To the worldly art student, the intense little Ted with his big cutaway guitar and protruding ears was inevitably “just a kid.”

John’s answer was to accept George as a guitarist but not as an equal and still less, to begin with, as a friend. “[George] was just too young. I didn’t want to know him at first. He came round [to Mendips] once and asked me to go to the pictures with him, but I pretended I was too busy.” Nor was it from John alone that snubs and belittlement had to be endured. On the occasion of George’s first visit to Mendips, Aunt Mimi also happened to be there. Mimi had considered Paul McCartney a sufficiently unwelcome visitant from the Scouse-accented netherworld. Unassuming little George, with his bus-driving dad, his Speke council house, his Saturday job as a butcher’s errand boy—above all, his unusually deep, adenoidal Liverpudlian voice—could hardly have dismayed her more if he’d marched into the front hall and begun laying about its Royal Worcester and Coalport china with a hatchet. “He’s a real wacker, isn’t he?” she commented witheringly after he’d gone. “You always seem to like the low-class types, don’t you, John?”

George swallowed all such slights—though he did not forget them—and by March 1958, having by now turned fifteen, was a full-fledged Quarryman. That month Paul wrote to a man named Mike Robbins, the husband of his cousin Bett, who was entertainments manager at Butlins Holiday Camp, in Filey. With true McCartney hubris but, alas, unsuccessfully, he offered the Quarrymen as resident performers during the next summer vacation.

George brought the number of guitarists in the Quarrymen to four, a not unusual complement for strum-happy skiffle groups but too many for the cooler, more calculated image of rock ’n’ roll. Balance could be restored only by dropping Eric Griffiths, the last of John’s original sidemen from Quarry Bank school. He was not an
especially accomplished player and had never enjoyed the friendship with John that would have protected his back.

The group had also, coincidentally, lost Len Garry, the only other one who might perhaps have accompanied John, Paul, and George to their eventual destiny. In July 1958, Len collapsed at home and was rushed to Sefton General Hospital in a coma. He was found to be suffering from meningitis, an illness triggered, among other things, by breathing fetid air in subterranean dives like the Cavern. Once off the danger list, he was moved to the convalescent hospital at Fazakerley, where he remained until January 1959.

Eric Griffiths said later that John offered him a chance to stay on in the Quarrymen if he would replace Len on bass, but using one of the new electric bass guitars rather than an outmoded tea chest. When he replied that such a technological marvel was far beyond his means, the plot against him moved swiftly. His best friend in the group, Colin Hanton, was visited by Nigel Walley, informed of the collective will, and persuaded not to walk out in sympathy—for Colin’s drum kit, if not Colin’s drumming, remained a vital collective asset. The next time a group rehearsal was scheduled, Griffiths was simply not told about it. Colin then delivered formal notification that he was out.

Ironically, the change of image that was meant to improve the Quarrymen’s fortunes seemed to have a quite opposite effect. After the departure of Garry and Griffiths, the supply of paid gigs dwindled almost to nothing. For the next year, as graver matters overshadowed John’s life, his group would teeter constantly on the edge of extinction yet somehow never quite topple over it.

During this extended drought, most of the occasions when he shared a stage with his two young Liverpool Institute sidekicks had nothing to do with performing. Although the Institute and the art college occupied the same building complex, they did not interact in any way, and all interior connecting corridors had been sealed since their hiving-off from the old Mechanics Institute in the 1890s. However, there was an exterior side passage from the Institute to a section of the college yard close to a door that led to its cafeteria. Several times a week on their lunch break, Paul and George would do their best to obliterate their school uniform by buttoning their black
raincoats to the neck over their ties. Then they would slip along the passage into the college precincts to meet up with John in the cafeteria.

It was strictly against the rules of both college and school: had the two intruders been recognized by anyone in authority, they would have been ejected and reported to their headmaster. As Paul remembers, the thrill of danger always suffused this lunchtime habitat of John’s, where egg and chips was served instead of dreary school meat and veg, where fascinating females engaged in racy banter with arty young men, and where everyone could smoke as they pleased. “You’d see Paul and George sneak in,” Ann Mason remembers. “Then John would join them, looking quite nervous. The cafeteria had a stage, which we used for our college plays and shows. They usually sat up there together, because it was near the door, I suppose in case Paul and George needed to make a quick exit.”