Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Read online

Throughout the twentieth century, Liverpool was alive with music. The city boasted more than twenty fabulous music halls, which packed in crowds every night of the week, two shows a night. All the factories sponsored brass bands that gave weekly concerts in the parks. Dances were staged in a variety of ballrooms that featured live swing bands. People routinely sang in the pubs. “You could walk down any street, any time of the day,” recalled a Liverpudlian, “and hear music coming out of practically every window.”

  After the war, a new wave of music came through the port. “It’s where the sailors would come home on the ships, with…records from America,” John Lennon recalled. Initially, country music caught on quickly in the local clubs. “I heard country-and-western music in Liverpool before I heard rock ’n roll.” George Harrison’s father, who served as a merchant seaman, brought home records by Jimmy Rogers and Slim Whitman, two legendary American country music artists. Ringo remembered: “A lot of it was around from the guys in the navy. I’d go to parties, and they’d be putting on [records by] Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and all those country acts.” There was a time, right after the war, when Liverpool was regarded as “the Nashville of the North” for its rich deposit of country attractions performing the latest twangy rave as soon as another ship anchored in port.

  Hank Williams. © MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/REDFERNS

  Leadbelly.© MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/REDFERNS

  Woody Guthrie.© MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/REDFERNS

  But the American musical influence wasn’t limited to country. “We were hearing old funky blues records in Liverpool that people across Britain or Europe had never heard about or knew about, only in the port areas,” said John.

  George gravitated to music by Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly, and Woody Guthrie, which he said was “more like rural blues and bluegrass, not rock ’n roll.” That would come later. Paul, who was also a musically curious lad, followed the same general direction. “There were records other than rock ’n roll that were important to me,” Paul said. His older cousin Bett had what he called “a fairly grown-up record collection” that kept him fascinated as a kid. “Bett would play me records like Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever.’ Peggy Lee did ‘Till There Was You’ [one of the Beatles’ early numbers], as well. This led me to songs like ‘A Taste of Honey’ and things which were slightly to the left and right of rock ’n roll.”

  As young boys, the future Beatles listened to different types of music that would ultimately affect and shape their sound. “John’s, George’s, and my tastes were all pretty much in common,” Paul explained. “We shared our influences like mad. And when John would show another side to his musical taste, it would be similar to what I’d been brought up on, like my dad’s music.”

  Paul’s father, Jim McCartney, played trumpet in a jazz band, as well as the piano, on which he taught his son the basic chord changes and time signatures. “He had a lot of music in him,” Paul recalled. “Whenever John sang, I automatically sang in harmony with him, and that’s due to my dad’s teaching. I was very influenced by him.” Ringo’s mother, Elsie, played the piano, John’s mother played the ukulele, and George’s father learned the guitar while he was at sea.

  Circa 1955: still life of a Bendix brand radio sitting on a table. © JAMES G. WELGOS/WELGOS/GETTY IMAGES

  There was music in all of their houses, just as there was music everywhere in Liverpool. “You couldn’t avoid it,” recalled John’s friend Pete Shotton. It was part of the atmosphere. The neighborhood boys delighted in singing together in the park. In the summer, they’d recline on the grass against their overturned bikes, wait for someone to cut them on the har-monica, then throw their heads back and sing: “Keep a-movin’, Dan, don’t you listen to him, Dan, he’s a devil not a man…” Or: “I’m just awalkin’ in the rain…” The boys had plenty of material to work from, thanks to well-stocked jukeboxes at Hilda’s Chip Shop and the Dutch Café, where they discovered records by Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. “We thought they were great because of all the expression in their voices,” Pete recalled. “Especially Frankie Laine, who was putting a lot of feeling into everything [he sang].”

  It was the feeling, in particular, that eventually turned the tide.

  John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr shared a love of popular music, but the feeling, such as it was, belonged to a generation that looked and acted more like their parents. There was precious little in those hammy ballads that actually spoke to teenagers. Oh, they liked the moods and melodies, but there was little, if anything, that genuinely excited them. The music didn’t speak to them in a way that expressed teenagers’ feelings, the insecurity and anxieties they were struggling with. Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, and Tennessee Ernie Ford were cool and suave as singers go, but they weren’t any teenager’s idea of role models—or heroes.

  Then, one weekend night in 1956, teenagers in Liverpool began picking up a radio signal from faraway Luxembourg. It crackled with static and faded in and out according to the ever-changing weather over the Irish Sea. But it was enough to hold young listeners captive, straining to hear every syllable coming over the airwaves.

  For a while, no one knew what to make of the music they heard over Radio Luxembourg or what it was called, only that it “was absolutely wonderful and very exotic.” Sometime later an announcer finally put a name to it. He called it rock ’n roll, and it would forever change their lives.

  Chapter 2

  BORN PERFORMERS

  Rock ’n roll!

  “That’s the music that brought me from the provinces of England to the world,” John Lennon recalled later, after he helped to transform its sound and shape a generation. “That’s what made me what I am.”

  To teenagers everywhere in the late 1950s, rock ’n roll was the rallying cry, the raw, combustible sound that connected them to one another, defined their adolescence, and provided a voice with which they could express themselves. The music touched on everything teenagers were grappling with: angst, impatience, love, sexuality, insecurity, rebellion, and fantasy—all hooked up to a powerful suggestive beat. The name alone captured the future Beatles’ imaginations. Rock ’n roll suggested thrills, something loud and disruptive, a certain disobedience in the way they could dance to it and what it said. The excitement of the music broke through all the boundaries, carrying listeners to places unknown. “When I hear good rock,” John said, “I just fall apart and I have no other interest in life. The world could be ending if rock ’n roll is playing.”

  Astonishingly, the first stirrings of rock ’n roll had escaped John Lennon’s ears. “In our family, the radio was hardly ever on, so I got to [it] later,” he recalled. “Not like Paul and George.” There was a steely decorum in the house where John grew up, an almost religious code of discipline implemented by his aunt Mimi Smith, who was a stern, no-nonsense woman. If anyone presumed that Mimi would sanction rock ’n roll, they had a rude awakening coming.

  John, May 1948, a few weeks after he entered Dovedale Primary School in Allerton. © TOM HANLEY/CAMERA PRESS (TEXT & ILLUSTRATIONS) LONDON

  Even though Mimi was tough on John, he adored his aunt with a mixture of admiration and awe. She could be a “merciless disciplinarian,” according to those who knew her, but she was also an easy touch with a big heart. It was Mimi who raised John, stressed the absolute necessity for self-education, and instilled in him a lifelong love of words. Her husband, George, a kind, gentle soul, taught John to read “syllable by syllable” at the age of four, after which he promptly blazed through the fantastic stories in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, and the Just William series. “He had such an imagination and built up the stories himself when he and I talked them over,” Mimi recalled. George recited John’s favorite nursery rhymes and, when he was old enough, taught John how to solve crossword puzzles. “Words needn’t have to be taken at their face value,” he explained. “They had many meanings”—valuable advice saved for later. Aunt Mimi and Uncle Geor
ge tirelessly devoted themselves to John’s happiness, but despite their goodwill, he never stopped thinking about his parents.

  Occasionally, John told friends that he was an orphan, most likely as a defense against his lingering unhappiness. But in truth, his parents had abandoned him by the time he was six. His mother, Julia, a headstrong free spirit, was an outgoing and vivacious woman who craved distractions, laughs, and excitement. The youngest of five sisters, she was blessed with a wicked sense of humor, as well as a fanciful way of looking at life. Night after night, humming with energy, she made the rounds of local dance halls, where she found herself in great demand as a partner in the stylish jitterbug competitions that lasted into the early hours of morning. She could tell a joke as hard and spicy as any man, which won her no shortage of admirers. And, according to one of John’s cousins, she sang—“with a voice like Vera Lynn,” it was said—at the drop of a hat.

  Julia was twenty when she met Freddie Lennon, John’s father. He’d been raised in a prestigious Liverpool orphanage, where he earned a reputation for being happy-go-lucky. “Anywhere Freddie turned up always meant fun was about to start,” recalled a relative. “He couldn’t resist having a good time.” Like Julia, there wasn’t a room he couldn’t light up with a hilarious remark or his screwball character. Wittiness came easily to Freddie, and he carried it off with such vitality that friends assumed he would capitalize on his personality. But he was never able to put it all together.

  From the moment Freddie and Julia met, they were inseparable. They entertained each other, made each other laugh in ways that complemented their fancy-free spirits. Both tireless dreamers, they spent long days walking around Liverpool, hatching schemes. Perhaps they would open a shop, a pub, a café, or a club where they would take turns performing, Julia cracking one-liners, Freddie singing and playing the banjo. He had a pretty good voice, a husky tenor, and no shortage of charisma. But despite all the vaudeville theaters in the city, there was no steady work and very little money. Too frivolous to master a vocation, Freddie bounced from office job to odd job, borrowing money from friends and an older brother.

  Finally Freddie escaped this dilemma by the route chosen most often by Liverpool men: he put to sea. He signed on to a ship headed toward the Mediterranean, working as a merchant navy steward and later as a headwaiter. Onboard a succession of ocean liners, traveling between the Greek islands, North Africa, and the West Indies, Freddie became a crew favorite because of his personable nature. Passengers remembered seeing him weave among tables “with a smile that sparkled in a room.” But the job meant that he was away from home most of the year. Even when John was born, on October 9, 1940, Freddie was gone, having shipped out on a troop transport earlier that month, doing his part for the war effort.

  For the first few years of John’s life, Julia threw herself into motherhood, devoting all her efforts to raising her son. Freddie reappeared every now and again, but it was only for a day or two, and then he was off once more on some woolly seaborne adventure.

  An easy childhood for John was never in the cards. Julia wasn’t cut out for motherhood. With John demanding more attention, balancing her obligations became too much for Julia. She did what she could, but with her husband gone and a young son to take care of, there was only so much she could handle. What’s more, Julia longed to spin back into the vibrant social scene. Any sensitive child would pick up the signals, and John, who was uniquely perceptive, interpreted his mother’s frustrations as being his fault. Reminiscences about his childhood were always filled with guilt. It was the rejection he remembered most, the feeling that he was in the way, the source of Julia’s unhappiness and Freddie’s absence.

  “The worst pain is that of not being wanted,” John admitted, “of realizing your parents do not need you in the way you need them.” Throughout his life, John Lennon grappled with the feeling that he “was never really wanted.” Life became harder still when Julia and Freddie decided to separate. John found himself embroiled in a series of melodramas, each one more traumatic and gut-wrenching than the last.

  Freddie put out to sea again, leaving no information as to his whereabouts. He remained just a vague shadow figure in John’s life and, except for two brief appearances, had no direct influence on his son’s upbringing. Julia moved in with another man, one whose temper could erupt without warning. “He had a very short fuse,” recalled one of John’s cousins. Julia knew when to get out of his way, but occasionally there was violence. This and other neglect took an early toll on John. “It confused him, and he often ran away,” Mimi told an interviewer, recalling the times she opened the door to find her nephew cowering in tears, unable to speak. More than once, Mimi took John back to Julia’s, where she gave her younger sister a piece of her mind. Julia tried to organize a model of family life in her new situation, but within weeks John was no longer living with her.

  Ten-year-old John Lennon in 1951, standing outside Mendips, his aunt Mimi’s home in Woolton. © Tom Hanley/Camera Press (Text & Illustrations) London

  The exact circumstances surrounding this development have been blurred by myth. There may have been some friction between Julia and the new man in her life; perhaps the presence of a young boy put too much strain on their relationship. Some relatives have suggested that Julia simply wasn’t up to the responsibility of full-time motherhood. None of this made any difference to John. He seemed to believe that it was somehow his fault, that he was to blame for Julia’s incompetence. “My mother…couldn’t cope with me” was the way he later explained it. Whatever the reason, at some point John was sent outright to Mimi’s, once and for all, where it was determined he would receive “a proper upbringing.”

  In almost no time, John settled comfortably into the Smith household. The family residence on Menlove Avenue—nicknamed Mendips, after an English mountain range—was as familiar as any he’d ever known, a cozy seven-room stucco-and-brick cottage. Sunlight filled the pleasant interior, warming an endless warren of nooks where John often curled up and paged dreamily through picture books. His bedroom was a small but peaceful alcove over the porch, from where he could smell the sweet apple tarts and crumbles Mimi baked almost as effortlessly as John later wrote songs. Aunt Mimi and Uncle George made John feel loved there. Besides, Julia visited often, practically every day, which in some ways made the arrangement better for John, and in other ways made it worse.

  John’s childhood may have been confusing and painful, but unlike the loner persona he cultivated later on, he wasn’t an outcast. Contrary to later public opinion, he wasn’t lonesome or isolated. Nor was he “very deprived” as a child, as others sometimes claimed. “I was well protected by my auntie and uncle, and they looked after me very well,” John insisted.

  Instead, the questions he grappled with growing up were why he felt different, and how he could cultivate the ideas churning inside him. And what, if anything, would open up the world for a well-adjusted but bored middle-class kid from suburban Liverpool? He found the answer quite by chance one night in the privacy of his bedroom, as he was scanning the radio dial.

  • • • • •

  Thanks to geography and the cosmos, Radio Luxembourg had a signal that by some miracle found its way from its origin, tucked between Brussels, Germany, and France, all the way to Liverpool. Everything depended on the weather masses that collided over the Irish Sea. “There was always a bad reception—you’d have [to put] your ear to the speaker, always fiddling with the dial,” recalls one of Paul McCartney’s classmates, “but it would give you plenty to dream about.”

  Every Saturday and Sunday night in the late 1950s, three of the boys who would later become the Beatles (George, the youngest, was asleep by airtime) sat in their darkened bedrooms, tuning in to the station’s staticky signal as Radio Luxembourg’s deejays introduced the rock ’n roll records that were climbing the American charts. They were mesmerized by the music’s big, aggressive beat and the tidal spill of lyrics. The effect it had on them was awesome. Sometimes t
he boys would furiously jot down lyrics to the songs; other times, overcome by a thrilling piece of music, they would push their tablets away, lean back, close their eyes, and let themselves be carried off by the voices and the melodies that would have a lasting influence on their lives.

  Elvis Presley performing onstage. © MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/REDFERNS

  They loved the blues and rockabilly tunes that blared through their speakers. Early rock ’n roll pioneers like Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Chuck Berry genuinely excited them. But it was Elvis Presley who really captured their imaginations. In the spring of 1956, with the debut of Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” an explosion was felt by teenage listeners unlike anything that had ever hit them before. “When I heard it,” John recalled, “it was the end for me. Nothing really affected me until Elvis.” His friend Pete Shotton agreed, especially about “Heartbreak Hotel,” saying, “It was the most exciting thing [we’d] ever heard.”

  Paul with his father, Jim McCartney. © MIRRORPIX

  Paul’s discovery of Elvis was even more rapturous. “That was him,” Paul said, “that was the guru we’d been waiting for. The messiah had arrived.”

  From the age of fourteen, Paul learned to copy Elvis’s style and sound, capturing the familiar twang as well as the hiccup in his voice. “He was an incredible vocalist,” Paul said. “Elvis made a huge impression on me.”

  And Paul in turn made a huge impression on John, first at the garden fete and later in the months that followed. More than his ability or his singing voice, both of which were first-rate, John admired Paul’s knack for performing, his power to excite, to shade the music with his personality. It defined everything John was thinking about rock ’n roll. “From the beginning, Paul was a showman,” said Pete Shotton. “He’d probably been a showman all his life.”