The Beatles (18 page)

In the following years, while at Cambridge, Rod played banjo in a similar band that succeeded, however superficially, in making a record for Decca.
^*
Rod mentioned this rather blithely to John when they bumped into each other crossing Clayton Square in Liverpool center in the spring of 1960. An actual record—the taste of it must have made John salivate
with envy. “
He asked me if I could [learn to] play drums
and wanted to go to Hamburg,” Rod recalls with a pang of wistfulness. As preposterous as the idea sounded at the time, it nevertheless intrigued him, even if his parents strictly forbade it. He was preparing to enter his final year at university—and besides, the band, as it was described, sounded like another of John’s flaky deals. The name told Rod everything he needed to know: they were now calling themselves the Beatles.

Mimi had resigned herself to the fact that John would not, as she had hoped, return to Quarry Bank for the prestigious sixth form; John’s O level results put that squarely out of consideration. And yet, she was not convinced that his situation was hopeless. He wasn’t beyond redemption; he wasn’t like his father. One thing was certain: Mimi wouldn’t allow John to waste away in his bedroom with that guitar. Whatever the consequences of his indifference toward school, the responsibility fell to Mimi alone. She’d have to make some crucial decisions for him.

Mimi’s mission was precipitated by an event that had nearly rendered her apoplectic. The first week in August,
John and Nigel Walley procured
railway passes to Hampshire, where they intended to enroll at a catering college. John discussed his plan with Mimi, who put her foot down.
No nephew of hers
was going to be a ship’s steward, especially considering the deplorable precedent: Freddie Lennon wasn’t her idea of a role model, not of any kind. Mortified by such a scheme, she accosted John’s headmaster, William Pobjoy, and demanded that he sort something out for the boy he let slip through the cracks.

Pobjoy recommended
that they reapply to Liverpool College of Art.
John had gone there for an interview
before receiving the O levels results but failed to impress the proper authorities. But Pobjoy’s letter appealing to Headmaster Stephenson won John a reprieve. This time Mimi picked out his wardrobe and accompanied him to the school, a fortresslike building on Hope Street, next door to the Liverpool Institute. He was interviewed by Arthur Ballard, who taught painting. Even before John met him, Ballard’s name struck an appropriate chord of awe. There were marvelous stories about
Ballard’s exploits
—as a former heavyweight boxer, drinker, womanizer, vulgarian, rebel, aesthete, “soft-core” communist, and all-around provocateur at a conservative institution where the emphasis was on making art as opposed to waves. His status as a legendary teacher
was due in no small part to an irresistible personality, a gritty, vaunted machismo that galvanized his lectures. And he was extraordinarily talented. No one outside of the other Beatles would take more of an interest in John’s welfare until, three years later, Brian Epstein materialized.

Be that as it may, there was no immediate bond formed between John and Ballard—far from it, in fact. From that first meeting there was palpable friction between them. Ballard’s brusque demeanor intimidated John, who reacted defensively. Conversely, the cheekiness and defiance that provided for John at Quarry Bank didn’t cut it with Ballard; he didn’t for a moment buy into the boy’s indulgent attitude. “
Arthur could see right through John
,” says a classmate who knew Ballard socially.
And yet, on a deeper level
, he recognized budding potential that had escaped other educators. Whether there was an artistic empathy in the haphazard line drawings or merely some dim intuition he tapped into, Ballard felt John deserved a chance and endorsed his entrance application.

Good news aside, it was no cause for celebration.
When Mimi received the art college acceptance letter
, John acknowledged it grudgingly. School was for grinds. “
I was [going] there
instead of going to work,” he would admit. There was nothing anyone could teach him that wasn’t better served by his wits. That much he’d learned from experience.

Through the summer, John grappled with adolescent longings. He had taken notice of Barbara Baker, a pretty, valentine-faced girl with a thick, slightly wild array of mauve-colored hair, flirtatious eyes, and a way of looking at him that suggested she had his number, which she did. In fact, she had had it from when they were both nine, at which time she pegged him as “
a rather nasty little boy
” who fired rubber-tipped arrows at her from a treehouse perch on Menlove Avenue. Though he saw Barbara daily, often listening to records in the parlor of Mendips, John was reluctant to introduce her as his girlfriend. “With Mimi, I was always just one of the gang,” said Barbara, who sensed in John’s aunt “an air of foreboding.” It was evident from the way he acted that John preferred that Mimi not interfere in this new grown-up area of his life. Barb’s status was more aboveboard at Julia’s, where she received his mother’s enthusiastic approval and felt, if not one of the family, at least “completely comfortable” in the role of girlfriend.

It wasn’t just romance that had him dizzy. He was moving on to college and away from the old gang; breaching the bounds between Aunt Mimi’s and Julia’s house; changing his appearance to suit a restless soul; and experiencing an intense emotional awakening. In the midst of all this
was the crucible of his consuming passion—music. Rock ’n roll—what precious little there was of it in Liverpool—became his dependable touchstone. The execution itself was still primitive—John had barely five chords under his belt—but its effectiveness was dead-on. It was only a matter of time before someone or something provided the proper tools.

In a manner of speaking, he could have held his breath. The last week in August, Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool, tanned and noticeably slimmer. In addition to starting school, he came back to begin a relationship he seemed destined for: hooking up with John Lennon. Their first official practice together, a Saturday afternoon get-together in Colin Hanton’s living room, was more revealing than productive. Paul blew in, full of enthusiasm, ready to rock. He knew “more than a dozen songs” that the boys had been eager but unable to pull off: “Party Doll,” “Honeycomb,” and “Bye Bye Love,” among them. John had been working on “All Shook Up,” but Paul had it down cold, with all the vocal trimmings. Such an extravagant outpouring did not go unappreciated. For perhaps the first time in his life, John ceded the spotlight without putting up a struggle. In another situation, he might have misread this spectacle as a blatant power grab; anxious about losing control, sarcasm would have surfaced to mask his envy and inexperience. But he was enamored of Paul’s prodigious talent, so much so that all previous reservations disappeared. Transfixed, John squatted on his haunches, squinting, close enough to study Paul’s elastic hands. Despite the convoluted right-handed chording (Paul was left-handed), which gave a reverse “mirror image” to his patterns, the mechanics made perfect sense to John. “Paul taught me how to play properly,” John recalled. “
So I learned [the chords] upside down
, and I’d go home and reverse them.” Paul, he discovered, had the necessary tools to build a sturdy musical foundation. Hanton and Eric Griffiths did their best to keep up during this and subsequent sessions, but next to Paul’s stylish craftsmanship, their best proved inadequate.
^*
An instinctive musician only served to highlight their shortcomings. And in Paul, John saw something that he’d never before consciously considered, something essential that couldn’t be taught or absorbed. More than his ability or his singing voice, both of which were first-rate, John admired Paul’s knack for performing, his seemingly innate power to excite, to shade the music with personality. It seemed to define everything John was thinking about rock ’n roll and a way to perform.

“From the beginning,
Paul was a showman
,” says Pete Shotton. “He’d probably been a showman all his life.”

It was rough and it was raw, but it was also one of those moments when invisible pieces of an invisible jigsaw puzzle snap together. Never in the realm of pop music would there be a more perfect or productive match—all the more timely, because individually Paul McCartney and John Lennon were headed for trouble.

On a cool September day in 1957, between classes at the Liverpool College of Art, Bill Harry was relaxing in a corner of the canteen with two friends from the school’s new graphic design department. The three artistes, as they referred to themselves, were critiquing students at the other tables, conferring in urgent whispers, and growing more depressed—and scornful—by the minute. “
To us, they were all dilettantes
, dabblers,” recalls Harry, a poor boy from a tough dockside neighborhood who believed that art students by their nature ought to be practicing bohemians. These classmates disgusted him for their anemic conformity: every one of them dressed alike, in either fawn, gray, or bottle green turtleneck sweaters and corduroy pants beneath either fawn, gray, or bottle green duffel coats. A postwar squirearchy of provincial underachievers gone back on their birthright.

Suddenly his gaze rotated toward the dark streak of a figure weaving through the tables with a violent grace.
“Bloody hell!”
Harry shouted, startling his friends from their funk. “That’s a
teddy boy
there!”

All eyes noticed. John Lennon
stuck out “like a sore thumb
,” in a
baby-blue Edwardian jacket
and frilly shirt with a string tie, black pegged jeans, and the kind of crepe-soled orthopedic shoes such as Frankenstein would wear. With his hair ducktailed down behind his neck and jaw-length sideburns, the jarring “ted” image emanated heat. Bill Harry wondered how a character like that had managed to slip into a toothless enclave like the art college.

It had been easy, of course—and irresistible. Unlike the procrustean law enforced at Quarry Bank, the art college had no dress code, no nervous courtesies. There were no masters prowling the halls like bounty hunters, pouncing on offenders, no detention handed out for minor infractions. All gallant pretenses were abandoned. “
There was total and utter freedom
,”
recalls a student who was enrolled in John’s class, “and everyone thought it was fantastic.”

But no one other than John took such sartorial liberties. There had been a clangor about him from the start, an “
intimidating air
” of self-parody. His appearance was “
so over the top
,” the effect so “exaggerated and conspicuous,” according to another classmate, that it seemed calculated to attract attention. “
I imitated Teddy boys
,” John recalled, “but I was always torn between being a Teddy boy and an art student. One week I’d go to art school with my art-school scarf on and my hair down, and the next week I’d go for the leather jacket and tight jeans.” Ann Mason, a student in the painting department who also happened to be in the canteen, recalls the impression John cast on the others sitting there. “
He was quite a sight
,” she says, adding, “shocking, but also ridiculous, because he was the
only one
in a teddy boy outfit. Nobody else at college was interested in that trend. As artists, we were conceited enough to think we were before the fashion, rather than following it. [T]o those of us who weren’t of his mind-set, the more
in
fashion someone tried to be, the more
out
of it they seemed. So, after the initial impact, we didn’t take much notice of anybody like John.”

Everyone ignored John’s outlandish display—everyone, that is, except Bill Harry. “
Ah—
he’s
the unconventional one
!” Harry recalls thinking at the time. “I’ve got to get to know him.”

No one could have predicted a more improbable friendship: Harry, the soft-spoken little leprechaun, perpetually amused, with a tense, troubled smile, and an air of sorrowful endurance that dated from his father’s early death and the abject poverty it imposed on his childhood, and Lennon, whose outbursts were barely contained, boisterous and cynical, with an indifference wrought from Aunt Mimi’s pampered custody. Whereas John had bumbled through a posh grammar school, Bill fought his way, literally, through the gritty St. Vincent’s Institute, where even the priests would “bang you upside the head” to make their point and where students ultimately jumped him, kicked in his appendix, and left him for dead, an incident that caused his penniless mother to transfer him to art school. Not until Bill latched onto his cousin’s science-fiction books did his artistic aptitude bear fruit. Devouring them by candlelight (there was no electricity in the house), he eventually started his own science-fiction magazine,
Biped,
at the age of thirteen, working until dawn illustrating it, along with Tarzan comic books and fanzines. By the time he got to art college, his ambition was in full bloom. “They gave me a room… with a desk, a
typewriter, and a copy machine,” Harry remembers, “and I [started] a [school] magazine called
Premier.
”