The Beatles (25 page)

Toward the end of the term, Paul and George began carrying their guitars with them.
The institute had a long-standing practice
of allowing students to occupy their own time in the classroom while teachers marked final papers and exams. Boys clustered together at desks and worked jointly on models, some drew, others read. Stirred by the rare loosening of rules, the boys felt an irrepressible itch to see how far things could be stretched. Having pushed the envelope so daringly and for so long, Paul and George rose fervently to the challenge.

Late one morning in May, students heard “
the noise of an electric guitar
… come twanging out of the music room.” This was an extraordinary occurrence, inasmuch as music at the institute was largely theoretical,
limited to the practice of notation and its analysis. Any hands-on experience consisted of mindless exercises, such as triangles being distributed so that students could tap out tinkly rhythms, which snuffed out any spark of enthusiasm. What’s more, the music teacher would never have permitted such a display, being “
such a right swine
,” as he was, a man who was known “to smack boys he accused of looking at him in an insolent manner.”

And yet, the renegade sound persisted, loud and clear.

Colin Manley and Don Andrew remember being in a classroom on the first floor when the music began. Both energetic guitarists who played skiffle at the Cavern as the Remo Four, they bolted from their seats in an attempt to track the big-game sound. “
It was fantastic
,” Manley recalls wistfully, “just wave after wave of a bluesy, instrumental thing that had us rushing up and down stairs, trying to locate its source.” When they hit the third floor, the mystery was partially solved. Students were jammed into the music room, spilling out into the crowded hall. “
We couldn’t even get near the door
,” Andrew says, so reluctantly he and Manley hiked up on tiptoe, peering into the room.

They were startled to see George Harrison, a boy they regarded as “
just filling in time
at the school,” hugging the spotlight. He was perched on a stool in front of the blackboard, with the new Hofner guitar his mother had bought at his insistence, running down a riff with an incisive, authoritative touch. George finished playing “Raunchy,” which was becoming his signature number, then joined Paul in a medley of rock ’n roll songs. “They played some Little Richard, a Carl Perkins song, and maybe a couple of Chuck Berry [numbers],” Andrew recalls. Eventually a prefect turned up to move the crowd along. But the damage had been done. Rock ’n roll had invaded the institute’s hallowed halls for the first time in anyone’s memory.

“
They began playing in the art school canteen
,” Bill Harry remembers, “working out new songs or playing requests.” Usually a small crowd would gather to listen. Though not yet polished performers, there was an appealing quality about them, especially their voices. Helen Anderson, in particular, was touched by their flair. “
With no backing to speak of
, they were wonderful,” she says. “They harmonized just beautifully together.”

But occasionally John needed breathing room. Paul and George were great sidekicks, but in his eyes they remained kids, grammar-school boys. When the weather turned warm, John organized outings to New Brighton beach
with classmates his own age. Helen Anderson says, “
We’d share sandwiches
and a bottle of lemonade. None of us had bathing suits; we just pulled our sweaters down off our shoulders and relaxed.” As always, John provided the entertainment. He’d play the guitar, often accompanied by Stuart Sutcliffe, who was learning some rock ’n roll. “If things were miserable at school,” Anderson says, “I’d prod him to be funny—‘Oh come on, John, give us a bit of a laugh’—at which point he’d invent lyrics to popular songs and start buffooning.”

“I like New York and Jews, how about you?” he’d sing, affecting a Jolsonesque voice. “Holding rabbis in the movie show, when all the lights are low…”

The other students “laughed their socks off” at these “very twisted” parodies. It was a relief for most of them, considering the strained relationship that existed at college. Dedicated artists, utterly committed to their schoolwork, they liked John but resented his nonstop clowning, the senseless disruptions during class. “He made quite a few tutors look foolish,” says Ann Mason.

John would have gotten the boot long before were it not for Arthur Ballard. Like John, he was a terribly tormented man. “
Most people had a perilous relationship
with him: the closer you got, the more difficult it was,” says Helen Anderson, one of his star pupils that year. Much of that could be attributed to alcohol. His favorite watering hole was
Ye Cracke
, a tumbledown little public house with small drinking rooms stained brown from nicotine, around the corner from the college on Rice Street. Ballard held court there in a cubbyhole called the War Office, below a panorama of
The Death of Nelson
in which Hardy is depicted holding Nelson in his arms, oblivious to hundreds of anguished onlookers with their heads turned away—and which John Lennon retitled
Who Farted?
It was there that Ballard entertained his disciples, a small but acutely serious group of students whose perspective demanded mental exercise in addition to art. In Ballard’s eyes, “
John had an awful lot of intensity
” but was “totally overshadowed by Sutcliffe… and Bill Harry,” both of whom were “extremely well educated” and “very eager for information.” Then, near the end of the term, an event occurred that altered their relationship. As Ballard recalled it: “I found a sketchbook in the studio. I looked through it, and it was extremely amusing—[filled with] sketches, little drawings of other students. I found it quite satirical [and asked], ‘Who did this?’ [The students] were loath to tell me. Eventually they said, ‘It’s John Lennon.’ God, I was absolutely amazed! It showed so much talent.”

Overwhelmed by the discovery, Ballard “recommended [to the college administration] that John do graphic art so that he could get illustration instruction.” This was an extraordinary act of charity, considering that so far John had put no effort into his work. But Roy Sharpe, the “
very conservative” director
of the graphic art division, flatly turned down the request, a denial that was echoed by the head of the illustration department. Neither tutor wished to take on such a liability, dismissing John as a “totally disruptive” influence.

This only confirmed John’s worst fears about art college. After eight uninspiring months at the school, he saw it for what it was: a treadmill, a dead end. From the outset, he’d always suspected as much. His well-regarded classmates played by the rules; they were lackeys to the system and they’d leave school with no more insight than it permitted them to have. They’d be like sheep, ordinary and unoriginal, turned out of a mold. To John, that was no more interesting than “
wallpaper
.” Besides, few students had the talent to make their mark; they’d inevitably wind up teaching, which was a death sentence. “
I was different
,” he protested much later. “But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fuckin’ dentist or a teacher.”

“They” were the tutors, the source of his greatest frustration. It was “they,” after all, who stifled his creativity, “they” who wanted to put him in a box. “
All they had was information
that I didn’t need,” he complained, looking back on his art college nemeses. For the first—and surely not the last—time in his life, John sensed a conspiracy to handcuff and muzzle him.

It was more productive for him to reject the whole business. John may have suspected as early as the summer that his writing with Paul was the turning point. It certainly provided enough evidence of his uniqueness; it gave his special gift some place to flourish. By the end of June, John and Paul decided to put their talent to the test.

The Quarry Men were going to make a record.

Chapter 8
The College Band

I
n all of Liverpool, there was only one recording studio—and it wasn’t much of a recording studio, at that.

Percy Phillips’s “
professional tape and disc recording service
” was sandwiched between the family kitchen and a front parlor that functioned as an electrical goods shop, in the converted living room of a
rambling, redbrick
terrace house. Upstairs, Phillips’s wife rented “
a theatrical flat
” to actors from the Liverpool Playhouse and, on occasion, would entice them into the studio to record poetry and monologues from favorite plays. But for the most part, the studio attracted school choirs and would-be singers. Phillips, a formal but snarly gentleman who’d just turned sixty, spent endless hours tucked away in the hot, airless cell, engineering sessions for the popular country-and-western singers he loved.

George first heard of the studio
from Al Caldwell’s guitarist, Johnny Byrne, who had
recorded a version of “Butterfly” there in June of 1957
. “You can’t imagine how impressed he was,” recalls Byrne. “He just kept staring at it, then looking at me and grinning like a fool.” The next day at lunch, George dropped this soul-stirring discovery on John and Paul, and from that moment on, a record loomed as their raison d’être.

The session must have weighed heavily on the boys as they traveled up the broad, well-paved stretch of Kensington Street in a rattly tram. Even though basically an unmastered demo and not a bona fide disc, it would be a record all the same. But if they felt intimidated or unsure, no one gave any sign of it.

As arranged beforehand, they’d met
outside the Hippodrome Cinema, where the no. 12 bus deposited John “Duff” Lowe, a classmate of Paul’s who played a crude, honky-tonk-style piano and had been invited to sit in with the Quarry Men. Duff and the band had rehearsed a pistol-hot version
of “
That’ll Be the Day
” for the session, but as he greeted the others, debate flared up again over what to put on the flip side.
A rainstorm materialized
out of nowhere and sent the boys scrambling with their equipment onto another northbound bus, leaving the song selection unresolved even as they disembarked at the studio.

They couldn’t have been prepared for what they found. The “studio” was even more primitive than they’d expected, “a tiny, tiny room with some basic recording equipment
^*
shoved to one side” and a solitary microphone in the center. Percy Phillips, says Colin Hanton, “was
a naffy old man
, grumpy and excitable, who insisted we settle up the bill before setting up the equipment.” The five boys were prepared to kick in
3s. 6d. each
to cover the cost quoted over the telephone. But as they now pooled their resources, Phillips mentioned a surcharge to transfer the song from tape to record.

The plan had been to lay down a basic track, rebuilding it with as many retakes as was necessary to produce a flawless performance. But as Phillips performed a sound check, he explained that for the cut-rate price, he wasn’t putting them on tape; they’d “
go straight to vinyl
,” which meant any mistakes were permanent. This news troubled the band, which had only rehearsed one song, and even that still had its rough spots. Hastily, they tuned up and ran down the number, patching any holes as best they could, while Phillips struggled to get a level of some kind on Colin Hanton’s thunderous drums. When a solution was finally worked out—
John, rather ingeniously, suggested
draping Hanton’s scarf over the snare drum to dampen the vibration—they launched into “That’ll Be the Day” with the energy of a man chasing a train.

Listening to the scratchy recording today, there is a clear sense of the band’s rush to perfection. From that opening legendary riff—a series of exacting triplets that George performed with flair, having
transposed it to the B-string
(unaware that Buddy Holly capoed his guitar on the seventh fret and began lower)—there is an energy, a roiling exuberance, that serves them obligingly throughout the song. The style is no longer Holly’s alone. There are still echoes of twangy rockabilly in the delivery, but the interplay of vocal jabs between Paul and John, who sings lead with complete, almost startling assuredness, shades the song’s buoyancy with an intensity unexplored in the original. John seemed to know intuitively how to grab a listener’s attention from the start, refusing to loosen his grip; the
tension he invests in the lyric never falters. And the band is right in there behind him to provide ample support. All three guitars frame the performance in a sturdy, rhythmic groove, leading to a stylish instrumental break in which George and Duff Lowe trade the solo spotlight. For a shotgun, one-take, warts-and-all performance—let alone the band’s first dreamy foray into a recording studio—the Quarry Men managed to pull off a minor miracle.