John Lennon: The Life (23 page)

The long intervals of discomfort and boredom that had to be endured gave extra edge to John’s sarcastic tongue and his impulse to pillory human weakness or frailty wherever they revealed themselves. Tommy Moore, the group’s too-elderly drummer, was a frequent target of Lennonesque practical jokes—often cruel, usually pointless, sometimes perpetrated for an audience no larger than himself. As Tommy lay in bed at night, John would softly open the door of his room, lasso his bedpost with a towel, then pull the bed by slow degrees toward the door. However tireless the baiting of Tommy, he
got off lightly in comparison with Stu Sutcliffe. It was as if standing onstage with the Hofner president like a sunburst millstone around his neck robbed Stu of everything that had made John respect, or even like, him. The others took their cue from John, mocking Stu’s musicianship and appearance, making sure he always got the van’s most uncomfortable seat, the metal ledge over the rear wheel. “We were terrible,” John would later admit. “We’d tell him he couldn’t sit with us or eat with us. We’d tell him to go away, and he did.”

Inverness found the star and his group for once in the same overnight accommodation, with the bonus of a pretty view across water. Here it emerged that Billy Fury was not the only Parnes singer in the arcane business of writing his own material. Gentle, too, had already composed several Buddy Holly–ish songs, and he took advantage of this respite to work on a half-finished ballad called “I’ve Just Fallen.” John, who was listening in, mentioned that he did “a bit of songwriting” and suggested that Gentle’s middle eight—the gear change after the opening couple of verses—didn’t quite work. He had a spare middle eight, he said, that Gentle was welcome to put into the song.

We know that we’ll get by

Just wait and see.

Just like the song tells us

The best things in life are free.

 

Although never to make the charts, “I’ve Just Fallen” had a respectable enough career ahead of it. A year afterward, the producer John Barry picked it up as an album track for Britain’s then most successful pop star, Adam Faith. In 1962, Gentle himself recorded it as a B-side under the new name of Darren Young. That simple minor-key middle eight—for which he received neither credit nor payment—thus represents the first John Lennon words and music ever to be professionally recorded. Ironically, both versions appeared on Parlophone, the label that soon would spout out his hits like a geyser.

En route from Inverness to Fraserburgh, Gerry Scott, the van driver, was feeling hung-over, so he asked Johnny Gentle to take a
spell behind the wheel. At a confusing road fork, Gentle turned the wrong way and hit an approaching car head-on. The impact hurled a sleeping John from the back of the van into the front and sent the piled-up stage equipment cannoning into Tommy Moore with such force that two of his front teeth were loosened. The first arrivals at the crash scene were a pair of teenage girls from a nearby house; recognizing Gentle, they took the opportunity to collect autographs from him and his five dazed companions.

Fortunately no police were involved, but Tommy Moore had to be driven to a hospital suffering from concussion. Despite his traumatized state, there was no question of Tommy being excused his so-crucial role onstage. While he was still being treated in the emergency room, John turned up accompanied by the show’s promoter and virtually frog-marched him off to duty. He had only a confused memory of playing that night, full of painkilling drugs and with a bandage around his head.

Things went rapidly downhill from there. The sidemen had by now spent all their small subsistence allowance from Larry Parnes, but had seen no sign of the second installment Parnes was meant to send them via Allan Williams. For the tour’s last couple of days, they were reduced to semivagrancy, skipping out of cafés without paying and sleeping in the van. Good-natured Johnny Gentle, who suffered no such hardships, offered to telephone Parnes on their behalf to chase up the missing payment. When Gentle seemed not to be pitching it strongly enough, John grabbed the receiver. “He didn’t hold back. It was like ‘We’re fuckin’ skint up here. We haven’t got a pot to piss in. We need money, Larry!’” Gentle remembers. “Anyway, it seemed to work because Williams did send them up a few pounds more.” Stu’s mother also made a contribution to help pay for their train tickets home.

I
f the Scottish tour did little for the Silver Beetles’ finances (Tommy’s girlfriend was horrified to think how much more he could have made in a comparable period at Garston bottle works), at least it put them on a significantly improved footing back in Liverpool. Johnny Gentle sang their praises to Larry Parnes, saying he would
happily tour with them again and urging Parnes to put them under permanent contract. But Parnes had enough on his plate with solo singers like Dickie Pride, the so-called “Sheik of Shake,” who was prone to drink, drugs, and stealing cars. He preferred not to risk multiplying such headaches by five.

In any case, the Silver Beetles had by now acquired a manager-cum-agent in Allan Williams—albeit one who would always regard the office more as a burden than a privilege. Williams began handling their Merseyside bookings under the same loose arrangement he had with their one-time gods Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and Derry and the Seniors. In between, they were granted a second-string residency in the Jacaranda basement, appearing every Monday, when the West Indian steel band had the night off.

Early in June, an arts festival at the university brought the celebrated young poet Royston Ellis on what he intended to be only a short visit to Liverpool. Nineteen-year-old Ellis was a beat poet in the literal sense, having conceived the unprecedented notion of fusing highbrow spoken verse together with lowbrow—or, rather, no-brow—live rock ’n’ roll. Other than John Betjeman, he was the only British poet regularly seen on prime-time television, when he would read his work backed by, among others, Cliff Richard’s Shadows and the future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

After his Liverpool University gig, Ellis gravitated to the Jacaranda, there falling into conversation with “a dishy-looking boy” whose name turned out to be George Harrison. Later that evening, George took him to Gambier Terrace to meet John and Stu. They all hit it off so well that Ellis was invited to miss his train from Lime Street and stay over on one of the mattresses on the floor. During his stay, he showed his new friends a useful aid to staying awake in their all-night lives as musicians and artists. Ordinary nasal inhalers, sold over the counter at every drugstore, contained wicks impregnated with Benzedrine. One had only to break the plastic tube and chew the wick inside to get the same effect as any expensive pep pill. “I also told them that statistically one person in every four was homosexual,” he remembers. “John’s eyes widened at that.”

Since Ellis had plenty of money and was an enthusiastic cook, the
cuisine at Gambier Terrace during his stay improved dramatically. His most ambitious culinary effort, a chicken pie with mushrooms, unfortunately got left for too long in the decrepit gas stove and burst into flames, almost setting fire to the whole kitchen. John, he recalls, was fascinated by the idea of combining rock music and poetry, and awed that someone of his young years should already have published a poetry collection. Ellis replied that his real ambition was to turn out prose for the lucrative mass market; as he put it, he wanted to be “a paperback writer.”

To wind up his visit, he gave a poetry reading at the Jacaranda, backed by John, Paul, George, Stu, and Tommy. The event was such a success that Ellis urged them to forget their college, work, and school commitments and just go for it in London, the way he himself had done from Pinner, Middlesex, three years earlier. His valediction, so he claims, was to end their wavering between Silver Beetles and Beatals, and nail the pun properly at last. It should be “Beatles,” he told John, as a double play on beat poetry and beat music.

There has probably never been a title whose authorship was more fiercely disputed. But Ellis’s stay at Gambier Terrace and this final, irrevocable name change undoubtedly did coincide. Early June brought two regular bookings over the water in Cheshire for the same promoter, Les Dodd: one at the Grosvenor Ballroom in Liscard, Wallasey, the other at Neston Institute on the Wirral. For the Grosvenor gig, the Wallasey newspaper advertised the Silver Beetles, “jive and rock specialists”; a local press story on their Neston debut a few days afterward called them the Beatles. This second mention still listed the pseudonymous Paul Ramon, Carl Harrison, and Stu de Stael, but the name of “their leader” was given as plain John Lennon once more.

The Scottish tour had left Tommy feeling more battered than his drums, not to mention grievously out of pocket; he was also tired of the sarcasm and backbiting that John ceaselessly orchestrated against Stu, and—as a conscientious workingman—appalled by John’s beatnik philosophy. “Lennon once told me he’d commit suicide rather than get a conventional job. “‘Death before work’—those were his very words. His girlfriend, Cynthia, was sitting in the front
seat of the van at that time.” On June 11, Tommy failed to rendezvous with his colleagues at the Jacaranda for that night’s appearance at the Grosvenor Ballroom. Yielding to pressure from his girlfriend, he had decided to return to his more lucrative job on the forklift at Garston bottle works, so becoming the only person ever to resign from the Beatles.

The gap was temporarily filled by a picture framer named Norman Chapman, an accomplished spare-time percussionist whom they happened to overhear late one night practicing alone in an office building close to the Jacaranda. Chapman proved amenable to joining them and fitted in well enough, but he had time to play only three gigs at the Grosvenor—including an impromptu reunion performance with Johnny Gentle—before being spirited away as one of the very last victims of National Service. The Beatles were beatless yet again.

With no outside promoter willing to book them, almost the only work to be had through that hot Mersey midsummer was in Allan Williams’s own ever-growing entertainments empire. Williams’s newest venture was a strip club in Kimberley Street, just off Upper Parliament Street, grandiosely styled the New Cabaret Artists Club and run in partnership with a West Indian calypso musician known as Lord Woodbine. Here during their virtually gig-free July, the Beatles made a one-shot afternoon appearance as backing group to a stripper named Janice, with Paul McCartney taking the drummer’s seat. In terms of eroticism, it barely packed the charge of John’s college life-drawing class, particularly since Janice expected her musicians to play appropriate mood pieces like “The Gipsy Fire Dance” from sheet music.

Around the middle of the month, Allan Williams was drinking at Ye Cracke when he fell into conversation with a couple of out-of-town journalists. They said they were from the
Empire News
, the dullest of Britain’s downmarket Sunday papers, and were researching a feature article on how college students managed on their state grants. Seeing a chance to get himself into the article, Williams held forth at length on the poverty of Liverpool art students (omitting to mention his own opportunistic employment of them as decorators and strip-club musicians). He then took the journalists to John
and Stu’s Gambier Terrace flat, introduced them to its occupants, and hung around while interviews were conducted and photographs taken.

Williams had been misled, however. The hacks were not from the
Empire News
, but from its huge-circulation and scandal-hungry stablemate, the
People
. Nor was the article about student grants, but about the growing influence of America’s beatnik movement among British youth. In America, beatniks had been considered at worst faintly comic, with their folk music, horn-rimmed glasses, and earnest reading of Camus and Sartre. In Britain—or, at least, to Britain’s gutter press—they had taken over from Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls as symbols of juvenile delinquency.
THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR
screamed a double-page spread in the
People
on Sunday, July 24. A purportedly nationwide survey gave harrowing details of the “unsavoury cult” that was said (without any evidence) to have turned young Americans by the thousand into “drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialise in obscene orgies…and outright thugs and hoodlums.” As an instance of the “unbelievable squalor that surrounds these well-educated youngsters,” the report described a three-room flat in “decaying Gambier Terrace in the heart of Liverpool.” The accompanying photograph showed several of the tenants in what was called the living room, but was actually John’s and Stu’s bedroom. No squalid detail was left unlisted, from its broken armchairs and debris-strewn table to the floor “littered with newspapers, milk bottles, beer and spirits bottles, bits of orange-peel, paint-tubes and lumps of cement and plaster of Paris.”

Of the figures shown in the picture, Allan Williams alone was recognizable, by his black beard—his journalist pals taking pains to make clear he was just a visitor who’d dropped in to Beatnik Hell—to “listen to some jazz.” The only tenants mentioned by name were Rod Murray and Rod Jones. Mid-July being vacation time, John was probably not even in residence, but back enjoying the home comforts and steak pies of Mendips. This very first time that the media searchlight shone into his life, it missed him completely.

B
efore August 1960, everything that John, Paul, George, and Stu knew about Hamburg between them could have been written comfortably on the back of a one-penny stamp. They knew it vaguely as a northern port in the then Federal Republic of West Germany, whose name often appeared on the sterns of ships tying up in the Mersey. They knew of it even more vaguely as the one city on mainland Europe whose sexual daring surpassed even that of Paris. For years, Liverpool mariners had brought home lurid tales about its red-light district, the Reeperbahn, where female nudity was said to flourish on a scale as yet undreamed of in Britain and the cabarets to feature barely imaginable acts with whips, mud, live snakes, or even donkeys. The tarts of Lime Street seemed like maiden aunts by comparison.