The Beatles (22 page)

Egged on by Kelly, George sought out someone, anyone, who could help crack the mysteries of Elvis. Their handpicked guru was “
a bloke who lived round the corner
” from Arthur and played the electric guitar at a local pub called the Cat. His name is lost to history; nevertheless, his role remains significant. For the princely sum of half a crown each, the man agreed—was delighted, in fact—to give George and Arthur lessons once a week, in a room directly above the pub. “He taught us a few basic root chords straightaway,” Kelly recalls. “The first number we learned was ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart,’ by Hank Williams. We hated the song but were thrilled, at least, to be changing from C to F to G7.”

Soon enough, George and Arthur formed a skiffle band, the Rebels, whose name they’d “
nicked off an American group
.”
^*
Like most skiffle bands, it was strictly a paste-up affair—a few songs, a few chords, a few laughs. Rehearsals, for want of a better word for them, were organized in George’s bedroom on Saturday mornings. “We made a tea-chest bass for Pete [Harrison] to play,” Kelly says of the old washtub
decorated with gnomes
that was co-opted from Louise’s closet, “but it didn’t change the fact that we were awful.”

Somehow—although no one recalls the specifics—the Rebels landed an actual gig at the local
British Legion
outpost, for an audience of dozy ex-servicemen. They played four or five songs, including “Cumberland Gap,” their showstopper, which did exactly as was intended. “We didn’t go down too well with the old punters,” recalls Kelly, who, like George, was relieved when the Rebels were replaced by a magician and treated to a pint of beer as payment in full for their services. Thus ended the Rebels’ illustrious, short-lived career. By now, rock ’n roll had captured George’s imagination, and he threw skiffle into the rubbish bin and himself into rock with the furious energy of someone trying to escape a terrible trap. It is no coincidence that his Radio Luxembourg favorites were the exact lineup of flamethrowers that captivated John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with the exception that George was also drawn to guitarists such as Chet
Atkins and Carl Perkins, whose twangy riffs were the bedrock of rock ’n roll tradition. He paid a lot of attention to their vivid nuances, the phrasing and shading that made songs so immediately recognizable.

Restlessly, George plotted to get his hands on those records so he could learn how to play them. A part-time job as a butcher’s delivery boy gave him enough pocket money to purchase the occasional 78 at Nuttle’s, a nearby little electrical shop with a rack of records on the back wall, but to George’s dismay their selection was pitifully small and blindingly white; the Everly Brothers, Elvis, and Bill Haley were all well stocked, but requests for Fats Domino and Ray Charles drew a blank stare. Other sources were desperately sought. One was Tony Bramwell, a lad who lived around the corner from George. Their encounters were anything but intimate. “
Although George delivered meat
to our house on his bicycle, I didn’t really know him,” Bramwell admits. “But I discovered, sometime later, that he was getting all my records from a classmate named Maurice Daniels, who was a drummer in a dance band and had borrowed them from me to rehearse with each week.”

Before Brian Epstein transformed NEMS into music’s mecca on the Mersey, Lewis’s department store attracted all the traffic. George and Arthur were regulars at Lewis’s, but not to buy records—to steal them. “I had what was called a wanker’s mac,” Kelly says, “a straight raincoat, allowing you to get into it through an inside pocket, and which also gave you access to your trousers.” In those days, Lewis’s stacked 45s on the front counter, out of the path of serious audiophiles who scorned the teenagers. “We’d stand there, and I’d start flipping through the stack, with George looking over my shoulder. When I came to a great record, I’d put it at the front [of the stack] and then lean over slightly, continuing to browse, so that George could put his hand through my raincoat, take the 45, and slip it into my pants.” Kelly maintains they never shoplifted more than one or two records at a time, but over the course of several months the stash grew into a tidy little resource.

Says Colin Manley, who with George was considered the best guitar player at the Liverpool Institute: “
He knew how to color
a riff, which none of us even considered trying [to do] before. It was so different, so inventive—and serious. It’s difficult to understand how unusual that was at the time. Most of us wanted to just play that damn instrument, but George was out to conquer it.” His success as a guitarist, Manley says, was due to hours of painstaking, monotonous practice bent over the frets. “He used to come over to my house, put a record on, and we’d play a passage over
and over again until we’d mastered it, wrecking my [record player] needle in the process. Another time we tried to analyze Chet Atkins’s guitar playing. For hours, we sat together listening to his composition, ‘Trambone,’ on one of my Duane Eddy records. Later on, we learned ‘The Third Man Theme’ together and the [song] where he plays two separate tunes [simultaneously]. George studied guitar the way someone else would a scientific theory. And it challenged him in the same way. Whatever came later on was a direct result of his commitment to, and his preoccupation with, the guitar.”

By the time he was fourteen, George’s grades had plunged toward abysmal depths. He’d stopped studying altogether and concentrated solely on playing music. Only occasionally did he put in an appearance at school, and when he showed up at all, trouble followed. It came as a blessing when students got a break and rushed outside to unwind. On cue, George always made a beeline for the
Smokers Corner
, a well-worn patch of tundra invisible to the hawkeyed prefects, dressed in gowns with green silk braids, who patrolled the grounds like rottweilers. About ten boys, among them the institute’s sorriest band of outcasts (including future Beatles road manager, Neil Aspinall), would congregate behind a brick shack where the gear for the school’s Combined Cadet Force unit was kept. They’d light up contraband cigarettes and vent their collective scorn, ridiculing the platoon of uniformed students “square-bashing” about the schoolyard. Conformity offended them almost as much as the swots, or grinds, scattered around the yard on benches, grinding for an exam.

That outlook proved dicey for one of the Smokers Corner regulars. Paul McCartney considered himself a fellow traveler, a denizen of the outlaw fringe, and yet he moved so sure-footedly on the academic track. An all-out Elvis fan, Paul wore skintight pants, much like George, and combed his lovely black hair into a quiff. And although he spoke posh to a degree, his remarks were salted liberally with profanity. He was, in some ways, a bit of a double agent.

Over the years, that was to be Paul’s gift. It would be easy to dismiss him as a dandy-faced naïf, but he was at the same time exceedingly shrewd. Innocent though he might look with his guileless expression and puppy-
dog eyes, his lips rounded like those of an angelic choirboy, he was no angel. Not only had he won the confidence of a character like John Lennon, in the end he would outplay him.

As George recounted, “
I’d met Paul on the bus
, coming back from school.” Paul shared George’s interest in refining mechanics and technique, and the two spent afternoons practicing. But while George grappled almost entirely with execution, Paul provided interpretation. His approach was more intuitive; he could seize a few bars of music and, with a flick of the wrist or sudden burst of energy, make it his own.

Precision and expression: between them, George and Paul had hit upon the elements that distinguished their future collaboration. But almost as critical was the friendship developing between the two boys. Most institute upperclassmen never mixed with younger students, but for George, with his interest in rock ’n roll and undeniable talent, Paul felt the affection of an elder brother. He was touched by something he saw in the gangly boy. They hung around together on the weekends. He watched over George in school—Paul an effusively outgoing bloke, and George, barely fourteen and slow-talking, nipping alongside like a fawn; at lunch, Paul doled out double helpings from his outpost behind the cafeteria line; he rode the bus home with George to Allerton and dragged him along on a couple of social outings. But friends though they were, Paul had kept his business with the Quarry Men quite separate. George heard only passing remarks about the band, inasmuch as their exploits made news around school.

Toward the beginning of February,
Paul mentioned to his protégé
that he might want to check out the Quarry Men at a Wilson Hall gig they were playing on February 6 in Garston. It is not entirely clear how that unfolded. There are countless eyewitness versions of the historic meeting, many of which are suffused with the myopia of hindsight and self-serving glory. Everyone agrees that George turned up at Garston that night.
He had traveled alone
through the gray February landscape, taking the no. 66 bus from Speke. When he arrived at Wilson Hall, the dance was already in progress, and he watched the Quarry Men’s raucous set from the sidelines with envy and admiration.
The so-called official version
of the meeting is that, afterward, George auditioned for John and the others in the tiny bandroom behind the stage, although the likelihood of that is remote. “
Charlie McBain wouldn’t have permitted
it,” says Colin Hanton of their persnickety employer. “He always had a six-to-eight-piece band onstage, and you weren’t allowed to make a peep in the bandroom.”

In fact, it wasn’t until a month later, on March 12, that George Harrison lit the fuse that eventually shot him into orbit. At Paul’s urging, he arranged to meet the band at the opening of a dingy unlicensed skiffle cellar in West Oakhill Park, which wasn’t too far from city center. The Morgue, as it was aptly called, was the brainchild of a teenager teeming with outrageous theatrical flair named Alan Caldwell, who soon would change his name to Rory Storm.
Caldwell raised enough money
to rent the damp basement of a ramshackle Victorian house from his friend
Marjorie Thompson’s mother
. “
It was a dump
, the pits,” Colin Hanton recalls, “two pitch-black rooms, joined by a long corridor, with one blue bulb in the far corner.”
Ultraviolet skeletons
had been painted on the walls as the sole concession to decoration;
a wall fan pumped
enough fresh air inside to keep patrons from passing out. You had to be at least fifteen years old. And in the absence of an admission charge, it was mandatory to purchase a bottle of orange juice or a Coke, which just about covered expenses.

George was friendly with Caldwell’s thirteen-year-old sister, Iris, who was one of the prettiest girls in Liverpool. In fact, two weeks later, following a cruel prank that involved Caldwell announcing over the P.A. how his flat-chested sister secretly stuffed socks into her training bra, George chased the heartbroken girl down the street and gave her what amounted to
first kisses
for both youngsters. On opening night Iris was at her post, manning the club’s makeshift cloakroom, and she waved shyly as he entered, carrying a beat-up guitar.

The front room was blindingly dark. The only way anyone could tell Caldwell was performing was by the sound of his
Hofner Senator
washing out of a distant corner. It took a few minutes before George found the Quarry Men, with Nigel Walley in tow, standing in the doorway to the half-empty back room. Paul made introductions, then stood back to watch how things developed. The other lads treated him indifferently at first, especially John Lennon, who seemed to look right through George. “
He was a very tiny teddy boy
,” says Hanton, “just a schoolkid, without much to say.” Finally, Paul steered everyone into the back room, where it was determined that George would play.

With very little prompting, George launched into “Guitar Boogie Shuffle,” the signature tune of British dance-band virtuoso Burt Weedon, which he’d copied in exquisite detail from a record. “
The lads were very impressed
,” recalls Eric Griffiths, for whom playing a piece like that was inconceivable. It was an elaborate song that demanded more than a bit of fancy fretwork, and George played it “right the way through,” with élan,
like a trouper. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Colin Hanton. “He played the guitar brilliantly—better than any of us handled an instrument—so I had no hang-up about inviting him to come around.”

Maybe Hanton didn’t, but John did. He wanted nothing to do with a mere schoolboy and told Paul so. Not one to be denied easily, Paul went into action, engineering another “chance” meeting between John and George in, of all places, the empty upper deck of a Liverpool bus. Once again, George had his guitar in tow, and this time he zipped, albeit “nervously,” through a credible rendition of “Raunchy.” Beaming like a shrewd politician, Paul knew he had won his argument.

Still, George’s age was almost “too much” for John to get past, “Raunchy” or no “Raunchy.” John admitted as much, saying, “
George was just too young
…. [He] looked even younger than Paul, and Paul looked about ten, with his baby face.” That wasn’t the image John wanted to project. But George was, in fact, the best musician up for grabs that John had come across, and ultimately that made Harrison irresistible. John had worked very hard picking sidemen for the Quarry Men who best showed off his talent. In no other area were his energy and willingness to do whatever was necessary to achieve a goal more evident. He’d landed the rare-as-sugar drummer, exiled his inadequate best friend, and recruited Paul McCartney, thus relinquishing some of the spotlight he’d monopolized up to now. In that sense, George Harrison was like catnip.