The Beatles (24 page)

More germane to their discovery of Buddy Holly was that he wrote his own songs. “
People these days take it for granted
that you do,” Paul recalled, “but nobody used to then.” It reinforced the capricious experiment that they’d heretofore only tiptoed around with trepidation. Buddy Holly gave them sanction—and courage. He was the whole rock ’n roll package. For John and Paul, this hit like an explosion. “
John and I started to write
because of Buddy Holly,” said Paul.

By March 1958, songs were pouring out at an extraordinary rate.
The McCartney parlor
, conveniently deserted during weekdays, played host to a revolving cast of layabouts sagging off school, its frost-rimed windows pooled with condensation from the rising body heat, the wallpapered room, which was too small for the turnout, engulfed in a purple cloud of cigarette smoke. Guitars rested against the coffee table, sandwich wrappers and cups lay balled up on its surface, creating an impression that the place
had been vandalized. Framed within this tableau were John and Paul, their hunched figures posed in profile on the couch—“
playing into each other’s noses
,” as John often described it—sifting through papers and notebooks fanned out on the seat cushion between them. “We kept the record player going a lot of the time, playing the latest American hits.”
They would begin by scrawling
, “A Lennon-McCartney Original,” at the top of a blank, blue-lined page, then jotting down “
anything [they] came up with
”—words, images, or fragments of lyrics that corresponded to one of the protean melodies that bounced back and forth like a beach ball until it was resolved. Gradually, a verse would take shape, then another; verses would get linked to a refrain, with rejected phrases blacked out or reworked, and substitutes annotated in the margins to fit a particular meter. It was an indefinite, unpredictable process; there was nothing sophisticated about it—no method to speak of, aside from studying other songs—just a general notion of where something was headed. A large measure of luck factored into it. And even then they regarded the outcome perfunctorily, like driftwood that had washed up onshore. As John recalled, “
We were just writing songs
a la [the] Everly Brothers, a la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought to them than that—to create a sound.” Constructing a great hook was their chief goal, something sly and memorable. “
Lyrics didn’t really count
as long as we had some vague theme: ‘She loves you, he loves her, and they love each other.’ ”

From the beginning, John tapped right into the approach that Paul first experimented with. Clearly, it presented no struggle for him. He had an innate feel for songwriting, a talent for turning a phrase inside out until it squealed. “
It was great,” Paul recalled
, “because instead of looking into my own mind for a song, I could see John playing—as if he was holding a mirror to what I was doing.”

But like all scientific processes, the payoffs were inconsistent.
Their first collaborative efforts
—“Too Bad About Sorrows” and “Just Fun”—lacked intensity. Burdened by lazy moon/June rhymes, there wasn’t enough to rescue either song. “In Spite of All the Danger,” a sloppy doo-wop treatment that stands as the first original tune they recorded (although it wasn’t released until 1996), and “Like Dreamers Do,” another misfire that eventually earned a cover,
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were shelved for lack of enthusiasm. The first songs that showed some promise were “One After 909” and “
I Call Your Name
,” the latter of which they wrote in April while camped out in John’s bedroom.

“One After 909” is as simple and straightforward as any song they ever wrote, and surprisingly durable for its economy. Built on a standard three-chord progression, it owes plenty to the early Chuck Berry hits, especially “Maybelline,” with a chunky R&B vamp, thumping bass, and country-type licks woven into the breaks. The lyric bristles with an emotional uneasiness, full of the unfocused, adolescent frustrations a guy experiences when attempting to hook up with his girl. But unlike the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl scenario, this one is ill fated from the start. He is certain what train she is traveling on—she’s told him “the one after 909”—but to no avail. When he turns up at the station to meet her, even the location is wrong. The song had all the potential for whiny self-pity, but instead of its being cast as a lovesick plaint, an unexpected bitterness churns below the surface—“Move over once, move over twice / C’mon, baby, don’t be cold as ice”—an early glimpse into John and Paul’s narrative finesse.

“I Call Your Name” proved every bit as effective, but with more of the upheaval and restlessness that appear in later songs. Lyrically, the song is a trifle, no more than a verse with a whiff of a chorus, but it packs plenty of heat. Unlike in “909,” the subject suffers great emotional fallout from a broken relationship, particularly at night, when, at his most vulnerable, he calls his girlfriend’s name—and she’s not there. There’s no way he can sleep; haunted by the breakup, he feels he can’t “go on.” Images resonate with despair. “Don’t you know I can’t take it” reconciles into “I’m not gonna may-yay-yake it, I’m not that kind of man.” The rhymes may scan in a rather mundane way, but the execution is extraordinary.

By the end of the school year, a respectable number of original songs had been copied into that beat-up notebook. In addition to the early Lennon-McCartney efforts, bits and pieces existed of “I’ll Follow the Sun” (featured on the
Beatles for Sale
album [U.S. title:
Beatles ’65
]), “Years Roll Along,” and “Love Me Do,” whose structure had been begun months earlier by Paul and awaited John’s tinkering. There were between fifteen and twenty, in all, “
most of them written under two or three hours
,” Paul explains, divulging a process that served the boys through nearly all their collaborations. “It was the amount of time we allotted ourselves and, in fact, it hardly ever took much longer than that.” Whenever they hit a wall—blanking on a phrase, a transition, or that elusive chord change—instead of resisting or addressing it later, they pushed through until the problem was solved, or at least they could see some daylight
through the snarl. Nearly always they brought a song to the point where it required some feedback. That was the main reason friends were invited to sit in on their writing sessions. “
It was always good practice
playing [a new song] for people,” Paul recalls. “We’d kind of try it out on them.”

Barbara Baker, George Harrison, Nigel Walley, and several of John’s art school mates formed the audience for regular Lennon-McCartney showcases.
Slouched on the furniture
at Forthlin Road while John and Paul wrote, they’d look up from whatever they were doing and listen to the latest work in progress. “
We’d do some good rhythm
on the guitars, and we probably harmonized a little together,” Paul recalled in a memoir. “For people who’d never seen anyone who could write songs before, we were probably quite a good little sideshow.”

With John and Paul spurred on by such favorable reaction, nothing could keep them from pursuing their craft. School proved a nagging obstacle,
the occasional stolen afternoons
unsatisfying, hardly time enough to get something going before Jim arrived home from work.
Weekends were reserved
primarily for the band. It wasn’t so much that they needed time to write as much as it was each other’s company. “
Something special was growing
between them,” says Colin Hanton, “something that went past friendship as we knew it. It was as if they drew power from each other.”

Or simply comfort. Their two fates seemed strangely connected. They were the perfect foils for each other’s disaffections. For Paul, who had lost his mother to an illness, and for John, whose home life was fraught with emotional confusion, their relationship created an alternate reality, free of such tensions. Certainly there was a competitive element between them, but it demanded so little in the way of compromise. And the compromise, they found, produced an aggressive inventiveness. If nothing else, that spring they established a mutual language for talking about music and dreaming about the future, a language that gave them common currency. Mostly, however, they let their guitars do the talking. No matter how anyone interpreted it, it was the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney best communicated.

To augment their time together
, Paul and George began spending lunch hours with John next door, in the art college canteen. This was more problematic than it sounds. For one thing, institute students were forbidden to stray from the grounds during school hours (a minor glitch, however, to
boys for whom hooky was a routine choice). For two years they’d been “
sneaking out
” to a fish and chips shop on Huskisson Street without incident, so an art school detour seemed of little consequence. Rather, an image problem prevailed. The last thing Paul and George wanted was to look like kids in their mentor’s eyes.
They craved John’s camaraderie
and, ultimately, his respect. And yet, walking into that building across the courtyard was a humbling experience, dressed conspicuously as they were in precious grammar-school uniforms, especially in contrast to John’s black shirt and jeans. Ties got yanked off; badges were unpinned from blazers. However, there was no practical way to disguise their clothes other than keeping their macs buttoned to the neck, which they did in a desperate effort at first, until realizing it only served to draw more attention to them. And there was nothing they could do to hide their adolescence. Most of the art students had already turned eighteen, and to them, Paul and George appeared like “
lovely little boys
” visiting an elder brother.

To his credit, John wasn’t deceived by appearances.
Each day, he met his friends
by the entrance, then accompanied them down a wide flight of cast-iron stairs to the crowded canteen, where they lounged across a tiny stage reserved exclusively for the annual college dress designers’ show and ate the students’ staple of baked
beans on toast, with tea
. The canteen was noisy, but its appeal was “
you could smoke there
,” says a classmate who occasionally joined the boys for lunch. As soon as everyone got settled, John would “
whip out a pack
of fags” and entertain Paul and George with “stories about the art school birds he was shagging,” spinning tales with about as much veracity as a fortune-teller. Eventually their attention was drawn toward “an older, ethereal, very talented painter” named
Johnnie Crosby
, who fashioned her appearance after Brigitte Bardot, with slinky, formfitting sweaters and “
wonderful honey-blond hair
piled up into a beehive,” and sat alone each lunch hour at the opposite side of the stage, her long legs crossed provocatively in deference to the boys who were “
swanning about and drooling
over her.”

“
Hey, John? Have you had
her
yet?
” they’d chime in a chorus of breathless anticipation. To which John would glumly snap, “No!” before amending it to “Not
yet.
”

John had no way of knowing the effect that his boasts of casual sex had on other classmates. All around him, he saw fellow students living out their bohemian fantasies. He just assumed that included sexual fulfillment. And yet, for all the free-spiritedness, the art college crowd remained frightfully inexperienced. “
A student’s having sex
wasn’t socially
acceptable,” says Ann Mason, who fought off escalating advances from Geoff Mohammed with game defiance. “Contraception was not easy to come by; you couldn’t get it without some dispensation from the vicar that said you were getting married within the next three weeks, and even then you needed credentials proving you were worthy of family planning. Actually, I didn’t know anyone at school who was having casual sex aside from the teachers—and John Lennon.”

In fact, Barb Baker had resisted his constant groping for nearly a year. She was “
too afraid of getting pregnant
” to surrender to their lust and said that “as far as we got were kisses and cuddles.” Still, they teased each other with maddening recklessness, necking and petting, until sleeping together seemed like the only recourse. Pleadingly, calculatingly, John swore his undying love, “
proposing to [Barb]
nearly every night.” Things got so intense between them that “getting pregnant… no longer mattered,” she said, and so in the spring of 1958 they “became each other’s first [sexual] experience.”
^*

Barb and John’s romantic exploits, combined with the continuing creative outpouring, converted those lunch hours into lively, much-anticipated affairs. In the canteen, Paul and George huddled with John, their heads tepeed together, earnestly talking music and sex while art students filed past them. Consistent with George’s laissez-faire attitude toward school, it was left to Paul to keep an eye on the clock, lest they miss the one o’clock class bell. Most days they made it back to the institute with seconds to spare. On other occasions, however, when intrepid conversation ruled, they forswore afternoon classes with a nonchalance that bordered on audacity.