I offered him some of my drawings to put in for the exam. I wondered if I’d get one of his tongue-lashings, but he just said “Oh, yeah…great!”’ Both Cynthia and Thelma Pickles would also later recall making similar contributions to his portfolio.
The college had just inaugurated a Department of Commercial Design, for which the polymathic Bill Harry was already bound. To Ballard, it seemed the obvious place to develop John’s talent for cartooning and satire. Because of his reputation as a troublemaker, however, the department head, Roy Sharpe, refused to accept him. A fuming Ballard retorted that Sharpe would be better off ‘teaching in a Sunday school’.
The college’s only alternative was to put John into the Painting School alongside Stu Sutcliffe, tacitly hoping that over the next two years Stu’s talent, energy and dedication might prove to be contagious.
In March 1958, Elvis Presley had been drafted into the US Army, the glorious inky billows of his hair planed to the scalp, his blue suede shoes traded for heavy-duty boots, the inimitable name rendered down to a mere serial number, the insolent flaunt of his crotch replaced by a stiff-backed salute.
‘The King’ was the greatest but by no means only loss to rock-’n’-roll’s barely erected pantheon. In February 1959, Buddy Holly was killed when his chartered plane crashed on a tour of the snowbound American Midwest, so leaving thousands of British boys—John among them—bereft of a friend whose speaking voice they had never heard, wondering where their next lesson in how to play rock music would come from. Yet just before his death, Holly, too, had apparently decided to move on from rock ‘n’ roll; his final recordings were thoughtful ballads, with his backing group, the Crickets, replaced by a string orchestra.
On every hand, deities that once had flashed and thundered invulnerably from the heavens now seemed to be plummeting to earth. During a 1957 Australian tour, Little Richard had seen Russia’s Sputnik space satellite flash through the night sky and interpreted it as a personal summons to him from God. Symbolically throwing a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbour, he had given up singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and begun training for the ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis had been hounded out of Britain when it emerged that he was bigamously married to his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gayle. Chuck Berry had been arrested on immorality charges connected with a teenage waitress, for which he would eventually receive two years’ imprisonment.
In the UK, however, rock was suffering no such vertiginous decline. Performers like Bill Haley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and the Everly Brothers, who had become yesterday’s men in their homeland, continued to release records and play concerts in Britain—and across Europe—and be welcomed there as rapturously as ever. Britain also by now had its own fledgling rock-’n’-roll scene, which gained in strength and confidence as its American exemplar lost heart.
One British city, above all, devotedly kept the rock-’n’-roll flame alive. In Liverpool, dozens of scrubby skiffle groups of yesteryear had metamorphosed into rock combos whose names combined unalloyed Yank-worship with native humour and wordplay: Karl Terry and the Cruisers, Derry and the Seniors (a play on America’s Danny and the Juniors), Cass and the Cassanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Silhouettes, the Four Jays, the Bluegenes. Several of the groups were far more than mere Buddy Holly copyists, featuring pianos and saxes like the ‘rockin’ bands’ behind Little Richard and Larry (‘Bony Moronie’) Williams.
At the bottom of the heap, so far down that few people even knew they existed, were John Lennon and the Quarrymen. Indeed, despite all the shaping-up that had gone on since Paul’s arrival, there was serious doubt if they would last very far into 1959. 1 January found them back onstage at Wilson Hall, playing for the overdue Christmas party of the Garston bus depot’s social club. The booking had came through George Harrison’s bus-driver father, who in his spare time acted as the club’s entertainments secretary and compère. Harry Harrison had also persuaded the manager of a nearby cinema, The Pavilion, to drop by and catch their act with a view to giving them further work in the future.
‘To start with, everything went really well,’ drummer Colin Hanton remembers. ‘We were even given our own dressing-room to rehearse and tune up in. The act went over great—all the bus-drivers and clippies [conductors] really dug us. When they tried to draw the stage curtains after our first set, something went wrong with the mechanism, and the curtains wouldn’t pull. John made a joke about it to the audience, which got a big laugh, and we played an extra number while the problem was sorted out. When we came offstage, feeling really pleased with ourselves, we were told “There’s a pint for each of you lads at the bar.” We ended up having more than just a pint, so for our second set we were pissed out of our minds, all except George—and we were terrible.’
The after-effects of beer and failure inevitably led to a row on the bus journey home. As an older working man, Colin had no taste for sick humour and took exception when Paul began joking around in John’s ‘spastic talk’—‘thik ik unk’, and so on. After a heated exchange, he jumped up, rang the bell one stop too early, piled his drums off the bus, and never showed up for another performance.
John was thus left alone with his two schoolboy sidemen Paul and George—a matchless combination one of these days, but back in British rock-’n’-roll’s Ice Age an unmitigated catastrophe. For without a drummer, however indifferent, three acoustic guitarists, however resourceful, could not hope to be taken seriously as a live group. Without the underpinning beat of bass pedal, snare and tom-tom, their songs did not qualify as rock, merely a form of jumped-up skiffle or folk that in the average riotous Liverpool hall would have to fight even to be heard. They put a brave face on it, and approached several promoters for work as a non-percussive trio, but from each one came the same brusque query: ‘What about your rhythm?’ John’s hopefully reassuring reply of ‘The rhythm’s in the guitars’ was the cue for slammed doors all over town.
One that remained slightly ajar led to a place he had previously thought an impregnable bastion of anti-rock-’n’-roll prejudice. Stu Sutcliffe and Bill Harry both sat on the entertainments committee of the art college’s student union, and managed to talk down the trad jazz zealots sufficiently to get the Quarrymen occasional bookings for college dances. At Stu’s and Bill’s prompting, the committee also voted funds to buy an amplifier, officially for the use of all visiting entertainers but in practice so that John, Paul and George could give the rhythm in their guitars some extra bite.
The college provided only occasional gigs, for negligible payment, and John, at least, took them with not much more seriousness than public rehearsals. One day, Helen Anderson had to give him a bright yellow cable-stitch sweater she was wearing when he hadn’t bothered to put together a stage outfit for that evening’s show. In exchange, he gave her his Quarry Bank exercise book, with its carefully indexed cartoons of ‘Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon’, ‘Smell-type Smith’ and the rest.
Times became so slow for the Quarrymen that George Harrison took to sitting in with other small-scale groups, in particular one called the Les Stewart Quartet, who appeared regularly at the Lowlands coffee bar. George’s defection looked to become permanent when the Stewart Quartet were offered a residency at a club named the Casbah, which was about to open in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby. It belonged to an attractive, dark-eyed woman named Mona Best, whose husband, Johnny, had for many years been Liverpool’s main boxing promoter. At the outset it was not intended as a serious business venture, simply a meeting place for Mrs Best’s sons Rory and Peter and their friends in the basement of their rambling Victorian home in Hayman’s Green. But on the eve of opening night, 28 August, the quartet broke up in acrimony, and Mrs Best asked George if he knew any musicians who could take their place. He volunteered himself, John and Paul.
The Casbah’s opening saw John graduate at last from the vermilion Gallotone Champion guitar (‘Guaranteed not to split’) that his mother had bought two years previously. In August, he persuaded Mimi to stake him to a Hofner Club 40 semi-solid model (i.e., playable both acoustically and electrically) with a fawn-coloured cutaway body, a black scratchplate and an impressive cluster of tone- and volume-control knobs. The trip they made to collect it from Hessy’s in Whitechapel would be enshrined in Mimi’s memory as buying him his first