Paul McCartney (12 page)

Too proud to jump off the bus after Colin and beg him to return, John, Paul and George carried on as a trio with just their three guitars, but quickly found their previous small trickle of gigs drying up. Every promoter they approached for work asked the same question: ‘Where’s your drummer?’ Their reply that ‘the rhythm is in the guitars’ carried little conviction when the thunderous likes of Ringo Starr could be had for the same price.

Consequently, their only public appearance in around eight months–other than strumming together in empty lecture-rooms at Liverpool College of Art–was at a McCartney family party at the house of Paul’s Auntie Gin. Among the guests was a friend of his cousin Ian named Dennis Littler, whose more successful group the three Quarrymen tried to join en bloc–but were turned down for being too young and inexperienced.

In an effort to shake off the skiffle image, they took to calling themselves Japage 3, an amalgam of their three Christian names, but no one seemed able to pronounce it correctly–‘Jaypage’–and the war was still close enough for the ‘Jap’ part to be undesirable. By summer, George had become sufficiently disillusioned to moonlight with another group, the Les Stewart Quartet, who did have a drummer and played at a coffee bar named the Lowlands in the suburb of West Derby.

Towards the end of August, in nearby Hayman’s Green, a woman named Mona Best decided to turn the cellar of her large Victorian house into a club-cum-coffee bar for her teenage sons, Rory and Peter, and their friends. The Les Stewart Quartet were booked for the opening night on 29 August, but at the last minute Stewart pulled out, so George rounded up John and Paul to take over the gig. Mrs Best was unfazed by their lack of a drummer and hired them, still as the Quarrymen, augmented by a defector from the Stewart Quartet, guitarist Ken Brown.

The four were also roped in to help her and her sons put the finishing touches to the new club’s décor. John covered the walls of the dance area with Aztec-looking shapes while Paul–whose artistic tendencies his companions barely yet realised–painted rainbow stripes above the recess where they were to play. Mona Best’s favourite film was Algiers with its famous chat-up line ‘Come with me to ze Casbah’, so that was the intriguing, sex-scented name she gave her cellar.

West Derby did not offer many amusements to teenagers and although the Casbah was intended to be private, a huge crowd turned up on its opening night to see John, Paul, George and Ken Brown play in the cramped alcove under Paul’s striped ceiling. Despite having no drummer, they went down so well that Mrs Best offered them a regular Saturday-night spot for £3 between them. When a story on the club appeared in the local paper, customers started trekking from neighbouring suburbs–even from the city centre–and other bands lined up to play there. Before long, Mrs Best had to hire a doorman to control the crowds and keep out the rougher element.

Paul by this time had had several casual girlfriends from the crowd who mooned over him at a distance. One was a slightly older, impressively-developed girl named Layla whom he would join when she was out babysitting–a useful means of access to some undisturbed hours on a sofa. Another, Julie Arthur, a niece of the comedian Ted Ray, brought him his first brush with celebrity. But it was at the Casbah that he met his first love.

She was Dorothy ‘Dot’ Rhone, an elfin 16-year-old from Childwall who’d recently left Liverpool Institute High School for Girls (an establishment strictly segregated from the boys’ school) to work in a city chemist’s shop. Dot was initially more attracted by John Lennon’s ‘rugged’ looks but on finding that John was already going steady with fellow art student Cynthia Powell she agreed to date Paul instead.

This was an age of unchallenged male dominance, nowhere stronger than in Britain’s industrial north. Liverpool girls, as a rule, were the most likely to stand up and speak out for themselves. But Dot came from a home tyrannised by her heavy-drinking father, a timekeeper on Liverpool docks, and so was excessively timid and unaware of her own bewitching prettiness.

As Paul’s ‘steady’–like the equally mild, malleable Cynthia with John–she was subject to an almost Victorian code of submissiveness and obedience. Paul wasn’t anything like as controlling and possessive as John, who’d physically attack anyone he suspected of fancying Cyn. Nonetheless, at the Casbah Dot was forbidden to dance with other boys, even the most platonic of old friends. Like Cynthia, too, she had to change her appearance to resemble John and Paul’s common fantasy, Brigitte Bardot, dyeing her hair blonde and wearing tight skirts and fishnet stockings.

On the far stronger credit side, Paul was loving and attentive, frequently sweeping her up and holding her in his arms like a doll. And after her own troubled, often violent home, she basked in the uncomplicated happiness of his, especially when the McCartney aunts, uncles and cousins would gather at 20 Forthlin Road for a party or a sing-song. ‘I’d never known anything like it,’ she recalls. ‘It was wonderful.’

During the Quarrymen’s two-month Casbah residency, they developed a close relationship with Mona Best and became friendly with her son, Pete, an 18-year-old whose brooding good looks rather resembled the Hollywood star Jeff Chandler. In their continuing drummerless state, it was a matter of great interest that Mrs Best had recently bought Pete a pale blue drum-kit on which he was already showing some ability.

Then on the evening of 10 October, fourth guitarist Ken Brown arrived at the club feeling unwell, so the motherly Mrs Best excused him from performing and put him on door-duty instead. At the evening’s end, she insisted on giving him his full 15 shilling (75p) share of the band’s £3 fee.

According to Brown, the thought of paying someone for not playing outraged Paul. ‘He was always tight with his money–John never had any, Paul never spent any–and he kicked up a right stink… he stormed off, shouting, “Right, that’s it! We’ll never play here again!”’

Behind this haughty exit, in which John and George joined without protest, may well have been a belief that they’d soon have no further need of piddling £3 gigs. A few days later, they took part in a talent contest staged by Carroll Levis, an oleaginous Canadian whose eponymous ‘Discoveries’ were said to be guaranteed national stardom. Before going onstage at the Liverpool Empire, they impulsively changed their name to Johnny and the Moondogs, partly in homage to America’s Johnny and the Hurricanes, partly to the recently-martyred Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed.

John had already tried to become a Carroll Levis Discovery with the pre-Paul Quarrymen, but they’d been beaten by a group featuring a midget who stood on his tea chest bass to play it. Despite the absence of a drummer, Johnny and the Moondogs fared much better, getting through the contest’s preliminary round at the Empire and going forward to the semi-finals at Manchester’s Hippodrome theatre on 15 November.

There they were sunk by their own poverty: the show ran late and they had to leave to catch their last train back to Liverpool instead of playing in the finale, on which the results depended. Then on the bus to the station, Paul discovered he hadn’t enough money left to buy his train ticket.

The three were on the smokers’ upper deck and a male passenger who was just getting off heard his lamentations and wordlessly pressed a two-shilling (10p) coin into his hand. Paul pursued this unknown benefactor to the top of the stairs and shouted down after him ‘I love you!’

The group’s future became even more uncertain that winter when John suddenly discovered there was more to art college than just a free rehearsal space. His tutors could claim little credit for this awakening, however; it was almost entirely due to a fellow student, Stuart Sutcliffe, with whom he’d been put into the Painting School to spend his second year.

Nineteen-year-old Sutcliffe was the college’s most brilliant member, an abstract painter and sculptor with a talent so unique and fully-formed that most of the staff did not even try to teach him anything. Four years earlier, the young Hollywood star James Dean had been killed while driving his sports car at high speed, so becoming a pre-rock ‘n’ roll youth icon, an Elvis without music. Tiny and delicate, ‘Stu’ had some of Dean’s brooding, poetic air–and was, alas, fated to be comparably short-lived.

Aside from his visual gifts, he was an omnivorous reader, with seemingly bottomless stores of literary and cultural knowledge. From the moment they were introduced, by fellow student Bill Harry, he got through to the cynical, chippy Teddy boy as no conventional teacher ever had.

It was from Stu that John learned about the French Impressionists, the rock ‘n’ roll outcasts of their day, and about the American ‘beat’ writers who had infused the spirit of rock into poetry and prose before the music existed. The band that had been his raison d’être was relegated to ‘a back seat’ (Paul’s disgruntled phrase) as he hung out with Stu, Bill Harry and a consciously arty circle, discussing Van Gogh, Picasso, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Corso with an earnest enthusiasm of which he’d never before seemed capable.

Most impressively, Stu motivated John to produce some actual art as opposed to grotesque cartoons, and was full of praise for the results. It was another snub for Paul, also a talented cartoonist, who had known about people like Matisse and Picasso since the age of about ten. If he and Stu hadn’t been vying for John’s attention, they might well have been best friends; as it was, an uneasy reserve always existed between them.

Though utterly self-assured in his work, Stu was full of personal insecurities about his appearance and small stature. And even with so impressive a friend, John could never resist homing in on insecurity and frailty. ‘He generally toyed with people,’ recalls Bill Harry. ‘If you stood up to him, he respected that and wouldn’t try it on again. If he detected any weakness, he took advantage. Stu was very mild and gentle, and John would put him down verbally in a way he never did other people in our circle, especially not Paul.’

As the 1950s ebbed away–to be replaced by who knew what?–there were other strains on the Lennon–McCartney partnership. John had moved out of Aunt Mimi’s and was sharing a room with Stu in a huge, chaotic mixed-gender student flat near Liverpool Cathedral (though he always crept back to ‘Mendips’ whenever he needed food, money or his washing done). That temporarily put an end to songwriting sessions at 20 Forthlin Road with the two facing armchairs, the exercise book full of ‘Lennon and McCartney Originals’ and the pipefuls of Typhoo tea-leaves.

For John, leaving the orbit of his domineering aunt seemed to bring on the reaction to his mother’s death that he’d been forced to suppress at the time. He had never been able to handle alcohol and now turned into an habitual and often violent drunk, given to acts of mindless vandalism like smashing up telephone-kiosks or urinating down the college lift-shaft. And college had introduced him to a new narcotic besides cigarettes and beer. Vick nasal inhalers, sold at any chemist’s shop, had wicks impregnated with benzedrine which one could chew for a totally legal, medicinal-smelling ‘high’. His reeking nostrils allowed him to stay up partying or manically talking all night and made his outbreaks of cruelty or self-destructiveness or violence even more unpredictable and extreme.

The John–Paul–George trio, meanwhile, was in limbo, still without a drummer or even a permanent stage name. Johnny and the Moondogs had been dropped as too redolent of that disappointing night in Manchester; if anything, they were known as ‘the college band’ since art college dances were their most regular gigs. John asked the students’ union to provide a PA system for them to use and committee members Stu and Bill Harry pushed through a vote of funds to buy one, on condition it wouldn’t be removed from the college (which it soon was, never to return).

After a time, the two Institute boys came to be regarded as honorary students, free to come and go in the college as they pleased. They also joined John, Stu and Bill in its ‘Panto Days’, when everyone took to the streets in fancy dress, collecting for charity (John simply pocketing the contents of his collection tin).

‘I remember chatting to Paul one Panto Day,’ Harry says. ‘He was wearing a skirt around his trousers and a spotted headscarf.’ He would always enjoy donning disguises, even after it became an essential security measure.

Resigned to being drummerless, they decided the next best sound-thickener would be one of the new electric bass guitars, whose throaty growl was increasingly to be heard on American pop records and even a few British ones. The problem was that bass guitars, if one could find them, cost even more than new drum kits; among even the highest-earning local rock combos they were still a rarity.

The solution was provided by Stu Sutcliffe’s talent as an artist. In November 1959, one of Stu’s paintings was chosen for the prestigious two-yearly John Moores Exhibition, sponsored by Liverpool’s noted business magnate and philanthropist. The canvas was not only exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery but also purchased by the discerning Mr Moores for £65. It so happened that Hessy’s music store currently had in stock a Hofner President bass, a splendiferous cello model, for the very same price. Although Stu had never played a guitar in his life, John persuaded him to buy the President and join the college band.

Bringing in a totally incompetent player was not appealing to Paul, especially one who already occupied so much of John’s attention. But as George would remember, ‘It was better to have a bass guitarist who couldn’t play than not to have a bass guitarist at all.’

John and Paul’s rapport always rekindled in vacation-times, when college and school loosened their respective holds. During the next Easter holidays, the pair decided to visit Paul’s cousin Bett who, with her husband Mike Robbins, ran a pub, The Fox and Hounds, in Caversham, Berkshire, way down south. Bett, too, was a great music-lover, and had first introduced Paul to Rodgers and Hart’s ‘My Funny Valentine’, whose couplet ‘Don’t change a hair for me/ Not if you care for me’ would always be his idea of lyric-writing perfection.

They hitch-hiked the 200 miles to Berkshire, taking along their guitars, and spent a week at The Fox and Hounds, sharing a small single bed as innocently as children. Last thing each night, Mike Robbins would come into their room and tell them stories about his years with a radio vocal group called the Jones Boys before switching off the light.