The Beatles (17 page)

The Quarry Men began to play as the procession turned onto King’s Drive, but it was clear from the start that even their staging was in disarray. “
John packed it in
straightaway,” Colin Hanton explains, “because people in the crowd were only getting [to hear] a couple strums as we [went by]. He, Eric, and Len just gave up; they fenced with each other, horsing around, which left it to Rod on the banjo and me on drums, just making a noise until we got back to the [church].”

By that time, St. Peter’s was engulfed with people: clusters of adults, teenage couples, and children spilled rhythmically across the narrow courtyard and beyond it onto the graveled path that separated the sanctuary from the dilapidated church hall. A smell of circus lingered in the heavy blanched air. Long tables had been set up on the grass, teetering with sandwiches and cakes. Lemonade stands were posted at either end, diagonally across from a plywood booth where children, their bodies nicely poised in liftoff, leaned strategically over a rope in an effort to land wooden rings on the necks of milk bottles. There were
literally dozens of such stalls
on the field out behind the church: dart games, coin tosses, quoits, and a treasure hunt. Used books were stacked for sale, as were lacquered candy apples, handkerchiefs and scarves, even household bric-a-brac.

Legend has it that the lads, anxious about playing in front of such a familiar crowd, decided to lubricate their nerves with a few hastily downed beers, but that simply isn’t true. “
John wasn’t drinking
, certainly not that day,” Colin Hanton insists. None of the other musicians recall there being any alcohol, either. Eyewitnesses say that John and Pete Shotton traveled together for a while but separated when John ran into his twelve-year-old cousin,
David Birch
, who had come to hear him play.

Birch reported seeing John’s mother and Aunt Mimi somewhere on the grounds, which, unbeknownst to the younger boy, set off an alarm. Earlier that morning Mimi had castigated John for “coming downstairs dressed like a Teddy boy,” in skintight jeans and a checkered shirt, and that
was one scene he preferred not to have replayed in public, if it could be avoided. Instead, the boys drifted in the opposite direction to watch a Liverpool police dog obedience display, featuring Alsatians trained to jump through fire-encrusted hoops.

About four o’clock, the band was introduced by the vicar himself, “
a simple soul
” of weatherproof rightness named Maurice Pryce-Jones. Though accounts differ somewhat, this appears to be what happened next: The Quarry Men played a spirited set of songs—half skiffle, half rock ’n roll—that was greeted enthusiastically by the wide-eyed youngsters who had pressed around the stage. “
The singing got raunchier
and raunchier,” recalls someone who was standing in the crowd, “and the sound got louder and louder.” John recalled: “
It was the first day I did ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’
live on stage,” and one can only imagine how he cut loose on it. He also mangled a version of “
Come Go with Me
” to hilarious effect.

At some point Julia heard the music and dragged Mimi with her to investigate. John’s radar picked his aunt right out of the crowd, though he misread her stunned reaction for dismay. “
I couldn’t take my eyes off him
,” she told a writer as late as 1984. “I was pleased as punch to see him up there.” And yet in a different rendering, Mimi claimed she “was horrified to behold [John] standing in front of the microphone.” Either way, her presence threw John slightly off balance, and aside from a little wordplay that incorporated Mimi cleverly into a lyric, he toned down the remainder of the performance.

Shortly before they were finished
, both Eric Griffiths and Pete Shotton noticed Ivan Vaughan standing below them, off to the right of the stage, with another boy in tow. They were both particularly happy to see Ivy—a dear, charismatic, unflagging friend and occasional member of the Quarry Men, who stood in for Len Garry when he was unavailable to rehearse. Smiles were exchanged, and somewhere in the communication it was understood that they would all hook up with one another after the show.

Afterward, in the Scout hut
, Ivan came in like a cannon. He said hello to everyone, then introduced his friend from school—Paul McCartney. Everyone glanced up from around a table, where they were having coffee, and nodded perfunctorily. Colin Hanton remembers, “I was sitting off by myself, just playing drums; a couple of older Boy Scouts were playing their bugles and just messing about. But it was clear once Ivan and Paul got around to John, there was a lot of ‘checking out’ being done.”

Len Garry recalled: “There was
a bit of a stony atmosphere
at first…. Ivan had told John about Paul being a great guitarist, so he felt a bit
threatened.” And Pete Shotton noted that John, who was “
notoriously wary of strangers
… acted, at first, almost standoffish.” John’s eyes slit to pin Paul fast in the taupey lamplit room. McCartney, who was younger and looked it, wore an outfit that required a little getting used to:
a white sport coat
with an underweave of fine silvery thread that sparkled, depending upon how the light hit it. The jacket, which was meant to convey a cheeky, debonair look, seemed almost comical on Paul, whose body was helplessly plump, his moonface putty-soft and pale. He had beautiful eyes, though, like a spaniel’s, and his spunk was jacked up several notches, almost to the point of being cocky for a boy who was, for all intents, on foreign turf.

Curiously, Paul had brought his guitar along with him. Sensing an opportunity, he stole the spotlight, running through a version of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” complete with the sibilant rockabilly phrasing and an Elvisy catch in his throat. “
He played with a cool, authoritative touch
,” recalls Nigel Walley. There is a tricky little downshift in the chord progression when the chorus, played in the key of G, drops in a difficult F chord, and Paul handled it effortlessly, vamping on the guitar strings with the heel of his hand. He had also succeeded in memorizing the lyrics, which was no mean feat, considering how Cochran jammed them up against one another in the galloping minute-and-three-quarters-length song. His voice almost hiccuped the chorus:

“So I walked one, two flight, three flight, four

five, six, seven flight, eight flight more,

Up on the twelfth I’m starting to sag,

fifteenth before I’m ready to drag,

Get to the top—I’m too tired to rock.”

“
Right off, I could see
John was checking this kid out,” says Pete Shotton, who was standing behind John, off to the side. “Paul came on as very attractive, very loose, very easy, very confident—
wildly
confident. He played the guitar well. I could see that John was very impressed.”

Paul must have picked up on it, too. He seemed to zero right in on John, whom he recognized as the band’s legitimate front man. Not wanting to lose the edge, he launched into his own rendition of “Be-Bop-A-Lula.”
It impressed John
that Paul knew all the words; John could never remember them, preferring to make up his own as the rhyme scheme required. Paul’s version of the song drove harder, was sharper, bringing the tonic fifth in on cue, which the band had simply ignored. And he sang it
with all the stops pulled out, belting it with complete abandon, as if he were standing in front of his bedroom mirror, without anyone else in the room. The fact that a local band and a dozen Scouts were crowded in there didn’t seem to faze Paul. Conversely, the onlookers were riveted by his performance.

“
It was uncanny
. He could play and sing in a way that none of us could, including John,” Eric Griffiths recalls. “He had such confidence, he gave a
performance.
It was so natural. We couldn’t get enough of it. It was a real eye-opener.”

But Paul wasn’t finished yet. Knowing even then how to work an audience, he tore through a medley of Little Richard numbers—“Tutti Frutti,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and “Long Tall Sally”—really cutting loose, howling the lyrics like a madman, scaling those treacherous vocal Alps that served as the coup de grâce.

“
Afterwards,” Colin Hanton says, “John and Paul circled each other
like cats.” Their interest in each other was deeper and more complex than it appeared to anyone watching the encounter. There was instant recognition, a chemical connection made between two boys who sensed in the other the same heartfelt commitment to this music, the same do-or-die. For all the circling, posturing, and checking out that went on, what it all came down to was love at first sight.

After listening to Paul play, John recalled, “
I half thought to myself
, ‘He’s as good as me.’ Now, I thought, if I take him on, what will happen? It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line if I let him join [the band]. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him.”

Paul and Ivan left before the Quarry Men’s evening “dance concert” in the church hall, playing between sets of an old-fashioned dance band. Aside from a brief electrical storm, which knocked out the lights for a while, the later show came off without a hitch. The Quarry Men packed up their gear afterward and hopped onto various buses home, except for John and Pete, who decided to walk. It was a beautiful night. The storm had drained the humidity from the air, and the boys took a shortcut along a piece of land they called “the style,” a “slither of rock only as wide as a passageway” that led across the quarry into Linkstor Road.

They walked without talking most of the way. At some point during their stroll, John glanced sideways at his friend and asked, “
What did you think of that kid
, Paul?” Shotton was crestfallen at what he interpreted as “a danger signal,” a warning that their friendship was about to face a
serious challenge. “I’d watched his reaction. In his question ‘What did you think of him?’ he was talking about
personally,
not
musically.
” Pete answered John honestly. “I liked him, actually,” he said. “I thought he was really good.”

Shotton realized then and there that Paul’s infiltration was “a fait accompli.” Even when John immediately inquired, “What do you think about him joining the band?” he knew the decision had already been made.

That summer, everything changed—the friendship, the band, and especially their lives.

At the end of July, postcards were returned containing the test scores of the General Certificate of Education Ordinary level exams that fifth formers had taken before school let out. The O levels were crucial to a student’s destiny: they determined whether a sixteen-year-old was eligible to return for a sixth year, go on to higher education, or be unloaded into the workforce. “
The whole point of a grammar school
was to get students to do well on this examination and hopefully go on to university,” says Rod Davis, who had passed his subjects with flying colors, thus designating him for Cambridge. It didn’t seem to faze John that he had failed every one of them, most by just a few points below the 45 percent cutoff.
He was “disappointed
” in not passing art, a course that by all accounts he should have aced, but as he was to admit, “I’d given up.” John refused all Mimi’s suggestions for apprenticeships and jobs in the family domain.

Instead, John turned all his attention and energy to the pursuit of music. He was haunted by Paul McCartney’s display of skill at the garden fete, the way he’d wielded the guitar so smoothly and with such panache, the way he’d sung all the correct words to the rock ’n roll songs. “
Paul had made a huge impression
on John,” says Pete Shotton. “In a way, his ability underscored all John’s [musical] shortcomings.”

Retreating to his bedroom, John practiced the guitar for hours each day in an effort to broaden his repertoire. Painstakingly, he transposed the banjo chords he’d learned into proper guitar positions. He waited patiently for certain songs to play over Radio Luxembourg, then copied a line or two of lyrics into a notebook, satisfied that he’d made some progress until the next opportunity arose. He cherished these transcripts as though they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, he told later interviewers.

None of this, however, satisfied his desire to streamline the band. As it was, the Quarry Men were as ragtag a bunch of musicians as anyone could put together. Of the core group, only Rod Davis showed any promise, and he was committed to playing skiffle, which John was growing to detest. The rest of the lads—Griff, Len, and Colin—had no spark, as far as he was concerned. They’d served a purpose, but they’d outlived their usefulness.

John spent much time debating what to do about the situation—and Paul. “
Was it better to have a guy
who was better than the guy I had in?” he wondered. “To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger?”

Ivan Vaughan solved part of the problem
by simply inviting Paul McCartney to join the Quarry Men. He and Len Garry, who were classmates of Paul’s, had independently courted their friend during the last week school was in session. “
John was very laid-back
about it,” recalls Shotton, offering no real enthusiasm other than saying, “Oh. Great.” But Pete could tell that “he seemed relieved” by the development. The only foreseeable problem was that Paul was leaving immediately for
Scout camp
, followed by a spell at
Butlins
Holiday Camp in Yorkshire with his father and brother, and wasn’t expected back until school started in September.

In fact, in the interim John had time to polish his technique and attend to other matters that necessitated his attention. One had to do with the gridlock on guitar that would be caused by Paul’s joining the band. It was impractical for the Quarry Men to carry four guitarists, especially in light of Paul’s ability. That meant either Rod or Griff would have to be sacked. “
Rod took everything too seriously
,” says an observer who often accompanied the band and considered Davis “a bit snobbish, too concerned with doing things by the book.” On several occasions John had reprimanded him for appearing “too flash,” which, in Davis’s opinion, signaled that “he didn’t want it to look as though I could play better than him.” There had always been some friction between the boys, be it their attitude toward school or their regard of propriety in general. In any case, the choice was simple and relatively painless. Davis had gone on summer vacation to Annecy, France, and was eased out of the band by his very absence.