Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Page 3

  • • • • •

  Paul owed much of this knack to his family’s passion for music. His grandfather Joe, an Irish immigrant, loved opera and played the clunky double E-flat bass horn in a marching band that entertained regularly in a local park and at parades, and his father, Jim, a jovial man with a penchant for deadpan humor, pounded out popular songs on an old upright piano. On oppressively hot summer days that brought the city to an early boil, more than a dozen neighbors often congregated in the street below the McCartneys’ parlor window and danced, to Jim’s accompaniment, into the night.

  Before he was twenty, Jim McCartney was already preoccupied with pop music. He would stumble home from work, stay just long enough for dinner, then hit the road, looking for a jam. During the early 1920s, he fronted his own band, the Masked Melody Makers, who wore mysterious black masks and played at small dance halls around Liverpool. Later, he led a smaller group called Jim Mac’s Jazz Band. Nothing made him feel more carefree than music, and with his brother Jack, he stole off regularly to the neighborhood theaters to catch the latest music hall revues. “My father learned his music from listening to it every single night of the week, two shows every night,” Paul recalled. It is easy to understand how this eventually influenced his son.

  Even though Paul’s mother, Mary, wasn’t at all musical, she encouraged her family’s passion. There was always music in the house, which delighted Mary, even when she craved precious sleep. Sleep was something she never got enough of, due to her demanding job as a midwife. Paul watched his mother depart at all hours of the day or night to assist in the home delivery of babies. When pressed into action, she’d throw her heavy nurse’s bags over her bicycle, dump her purse into a wicker basket attached to the handlebars, and speed off into the dark like Batman, often not returning home in time for sleep.

  Cycling around Liverpool was no waltz in the park. The hills surrounding the McCartneys’ residence were steep. Incredibly, Mary never surrendered to them, despite the effects of a cigarette habit that left her gasping for breath. One road in particular, Fairway Street, was the steepest in all of Liverpool, but Mary routinely scaled it, rain or shine. During the spring, Mary would be called out nearly every night, which was very stressful.

  Young lads looking in the shop window at guitars for sale, Liverpool, 1964. © MIRRORPIX

  Sometime in 1946, when Paul was four, the family moved to Speke, a new, windswept suburb a few miles south of Liverpool, which seemed half a universe away. There was something delicious about leaving all that inner-city congestion behind. To an inquisitive child like Paul, Speke was a magical kingdom, with wide-open spaces and endless horizons. He enjoyed playing outside all day with his younger brother, Mike, who, according to a friend, “followed him like a puppy down every street.” They were always off on a rousing bicycle adventure or hiking along a rise above the Mersey River, where they could see the entire northern coast and explore the old lighthouse that stood sentry for ships navigating around the channel. Other times, they climbed up Tabletop Bridge, where, lying in wait like superspies, they would pelt the onrushing trains with turnips scavenged in an adjacent field.

  But their exuberance collapsed when it was discovered that Mary had cancer. By the time it was diagnosed, the disease was already in an advanced stage; cases like these, Mary knew, were almost always fatal. But instead of dwelling on it, she saved all her energy for her boys, who were a handful. She ran herself ragged trying to keep up with them.

  Mary sensed she had little time left, and so she was determined to encourage the boys’ schooling. She read poetry to her sons and insisted they cultivate an interest in books and ideas that would carry them far beyond the limitations of their parents’ lives. Jim supported her every step of the way. An armchair philosopher, he stressed the importance of principles, such as self-respect, perseverance, a relentless work ethic, and fairness. Most of all, he expected give-and-take. “He was a great conversationalist, very opinionated, an impassioned talker,” said a nephew who recalled Jim’s ritual of “matching wits” with Paul in an effort to provoke animated discussion.

  The Everly Brothers. © CHUCK STEWART/REDFERNS

  Little Richard. © MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/REDFERNS

  Thanks to his parents’ encouragement, Paul was admitted to the Liverpool Institute— known as “the Inny”—one of the city’s elite schools, which sent as many students as possible to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. “The first year, I was pretty lost,” Paul recalled. “But by the second year, I was learning Latin, Spanish, and German—at age twelve, which wasn’t bad.” Paul described his performance as “reasonably academic,” but his grades fell consistently—and sharply—by the end of the third year.

  By that point there were too many distractions, and for Paul, nothing in school could compete with a force like rock ’n roll.

  Among Paul’s mounting distractions was Radio Luxembourg’s nighttime broadcast, which he listened to in bed via an extension-cord-and-headphone device that Jim had hooked up to the radio in the living room. Paul considered the broadcast “a revelation,” and he began to mimic the voices that wailed across the airwaves. The raw, raunchy, and often ferocious intensity of Ray Charles, Ivory Joe Hunter, Hank Ballard, and Fats Domino riveted Paul, and Little Richard’s extraordinary range would influence him throughout his career.

  He desperately longed to sing like these recording artists. It was next to impossible, however, with a trumpet, which had been handed down to him by a cousin. He pleaded with his father to buy him a guitar, but Jim couldn’t afford to spend three weeks’ salary on such an extravagance, especially since Paul already had a perfectly good instrument. Finally, Paul asked permission to trade the trumpet for a guitar, and Jim gave in. Paul made a beeline for one of Liverpool’s leading music stores, where he exchanged the trumpet for a crudely made Zenith guitar—a brown sunburst model with ƒ-holes—that was propped against one of the shelves. The salesman must have struggled to conceal his delight at the deal; it wasn’t every day he came by a trumpet worth five or six times the price of a guitar. All the same, he had no idea how pivotal that transaction would be.

  A Sampling of a Beatles

  Early Rock ’n Roll Set

  Kansas City (Wilbur Harrison)

  Leave My Kitten Alone (Johnny Preston)

  Heartbreak Hotel (Elvis Presley)

  Cathy’s Clown (The Everly Brothers)

  Baby, It’s You (The Shirelles)

  Save the Last Dance for Me (The Drifters)

  You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me

  (Smokey Robinson & the Miracles)

  To Know Him Is to Love Him (The Teddy Bears)

  Soldier of Love (Arthur Alexander)

  Roll Over Beethoven (Chuck Berry)

  Honky Tonk Blues (Hank Williams)

  Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby

  (Carl Perkins)

  Dizzy Miss Lizzy (Larry Williams)

  Rip It Up (Little Richard)

  “The minute he got the guitar, that was the end,” Paul’s brother, Mike, recalled. “He was lost. He didn’t have time to eat or think about anything else.”

  A teenage girl listens to a record played on an in-store phonograph, London, 1956. © HULTON- DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

  Paul’s lifelong romance with the guitar had begun, but from the outset he encountered mechanical problems. Guitars were made for right-handed musicians, and Paul was left-handed. Most lefties learned how to play right-handed chord patterns or simply turned the guitar around so that the fingering was reversed. Neither method, however, worked for Paul. They intruded on his rhythm, leaving his arm sawing the air in stiff curves and tripping his timing like a broken switch. Yet Paul would not give up. It took him weeks to figure out how to lick the problem, but at last he discovered a solution: he restrung the guitar in reverse, so that the thinner, high-pitched strings were in the bass notes position, and vice versa. It was “all rather inexact,” as Paul explained it later, but served to give him the contro
l necessary to synchronize the rhythm with the mechanics.

  • • • • •

  Paul wasn’t alone in his struggle to master the instrument. Even before he got a guitar, John Lennon would pantomime playing one, striking poses in front of his bedroom mirror and stomping determinedly across the floor until his aunt Mimi ordered him to stop. He spent endless hours lip-synching to songs on the radio. From time to time, John took the bus into downtown Liverpool and stared longingly at the guitars in the window of Hessy’s, a music store that carried the city’s best selection of instruments. He begged Aunt Mimi for one, but she steadfastly refused, arguing that guitar playing “was of no worldly use” to him.

  He turned to his mother, Julia, who was more disposed to the idea. During her daily visits to Mimi’s house, John would bring up the subject, reminding her how much she herself enjoyed playing the banjo. But Mimi’s objections posed a real dilemma. “Perhaps next year,” Julia told her son, “when you are finished with school.”

  How Did the Beatles Find Fresh Material?

  When the Beatles fi rst began playing clubs in Liverpool, fi nding new, fresh material became John’s most pressing goal and his greatest problem. Radio was the most accessible medium, but airplay at the time was still severely limited. The only radio station in the UK, the BBC, played little or no rock ’n roll. Sheet music was scarce, and the cost of records was prohibitive. The only other prospect was going to a record store, where it was possible to listen to one or two selections and try to write down the lyrics. So John and two friends would climb over the school wall at lunchtime and head to the North End Music Shop (or NEMS, as it was known). “You could listen to the odd record there in a booth,” recalled a friend, “but then they threw us out when they realized we weren’t buying anything.”

  This was small comfort to John, who was determined to have his way, even if it meant playing the sisters against each other. He came across an advertisement in a magazine for an inexpensive guitar that was “guaranteed not to crack.” All that separated him from owning it was £5, and after much pleading, Julia agreed to lend him the money on the condition that the instrument was delivered to her house instead of Mimi’s. The steel-string guitar was called a Gallotone Champion, with a style that was part cowboy, part Spanish. “It was a bit crummy,” John admitted later. But as guitars go, it was sturdy enough to hold a note, and he immediately began to wrestle with it to produce a consistent sound.

  John’s friend Eric Griffiths also had a new guitar and convinced him to take a few lessons, but after two, John had had enough. There were too many rules, not enough payoffs. John wasn’t interested in technique so long as he could strum a few chords and sing along. Instead, he convinced his mother to retune the guitar strings to the banjo and teach the boys banjo chords.

  With that under their belts, John and Eric were soon working out their own informal arrangements. After school, they met at Mimi’s and holed up in John’s bedroom, where they tried learning, without much success, the rock ’n roll songs they heard on the radio. “We were [too] limited by the few chords [we knew],” Eric recalled. So they switched gears and tried something simpler. Playing skiffle, they tore through simple three-chord classics like “Rock Island Line,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” and “Cumberland Gap.”

  John threw himself into the practices. He was completely uninhibited about singing, belting out each number the way he imagined an entertainer would deliver it. “John was a born performer,” Eric said. “You could sense that when he sang. It lifted him; he was energized by it.”

  Across the city, on the other side of Liverpool, Paul McCartney was caught up in the same kind of ritual. He was completely focused on the guitar, playing and singing to his heart’s content. It was the only thing that mattered, “and so the academic things were forgotten,” he remembered.

  Mary tried to stay after him as best she could. Her goal was to groom Paul for university and afterward, she hoped, medical school. But her health was failing. The cancer was consuming her. Occasionally, she would yelp and double over, kneading her chest until the pain passed. But as the cancer spread, her stamina faded. Mary could barely get up the stairs to the bedroom without help. On October 30, 1956, she checked herself into the hospital. The next evening, Paul and Mike came to visit—for the last time, as it turned out. Mary suffered an embolism and died shortly after the boys left.

  For weeks, Paul bumped around the house “like a lost soul.” No one recalled ever seeing him sink so low. “I was determined not to let it affect me,” he said. “I learned to put a shell around me at that age.” To fill the gaps, Paul turned to music. He threw himself into playing the guitar, practicing chords and finger positions for hours on end, but not in any way that expressed a sense of pleasure. “It was the only way he could disengage himself from the tragedy,” recalled his aunt.

  Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Jerry Allison and Joe Maudlin, on the Off the Record television show, circa 1955. © Mirrorpix

  Paul’s grades, which had already been falling to a degree, slipped even further. He “skivved off” classes with alarming regularity and paid little attention to homework. In the midst of so much emotional turbulence, Paul reached out for a lifeline: rock ’n roll. Listening to it for long stretches, escaping into its defiant tone and lyrics, took him away from the painful memories. Paul loved mimicking its nuances. Thanks to his ear for languages, it was easy for him to pick up the subtle inflections and shadings in the vocal performances. Buddy Holly, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins—they were all American rock ’n roll stars, and they had the magic, all right. He wanted to sound how they sounded, look how they looked, play how they played. Stretched across his bed, he would sink into a kind of dreamlike state, staring out the window, not looking at anything in particular, not even thinking, but lulled by the music’s alchemy, hour after hour. At the center of his dreaming was the desire to do something more with music. What or with whom, he wasn’t sure. But he sensed it was only a matter of time until it all came together and he put his own stamp on it.

  Eight months later, he met John Lennon.

  Chapter 3

  MOONDOGS AND SILVER BEETLES

  Once Paul McCartney joined the Quarry Men, John’s little engine of a band picked up steam. Still, Paul’s debut appearance with them—on October 18, 1957— was a complete disaster. Determined to make an impression, Paul had been practicing relentlessly for the gig, but he was so nervous during a solo that he suffered an attack of butterfingers, missing key notes, and the whole arrangement caved in like a soufflé. John, who took great personal pride in the Quarry Men, was momentarily startled—and embarrassed. “I thought he was going to lay into [Paul] something fierce,” recalled Colin Hanton, the group’s drummer. But the pitiful sight of Paul looking so deflated cut right through any hard feelings. John laughed so hard he almost fell down.

  The band was raw and amateurish, but that did nothing to brake the speed at which John and Paul’s relationship was developing. The two boys spent part of every day together, talking about music. Often, after school or on a day off, John would invite Paul back to Mendips, where they would hole up in John’s bedroom, playing records and running down bits of lyrics they’d memorized in an attempt to piece together entire songs. “We spent hours just listening to the stars we admired,” John recalled. “When a record had ended, we’d try and reproduce the same sort of sound ourselves.” Paul’s pet expression for it—“just bashing around”—seems appropriate. They found ways to play songs using what little they knew about chord structure and technique.

  Sometimes, when they sat in Paul’s sun-filled living room, all their big dreams poured out: the kind of band they envisioned putting together, the musical possibilities that lay in store, the great possibilities if they worked hard. John talked, in fact, about playing serious gigs—even making records! Anyone eavesdropping might have written off these plans as teenage fantasies; still, other teenagers had managed to pull it off.

  Young George H
arrison playing the guitar, 1954. © MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/CORBIS

  A rhythm developed between John and Paul that got stronger and tighter. They understood each other. “Once they got together, things became serious—and fast,” recalled Eric Griffiths. “The band was supposed to be a laugh; now they devoted all their attention to it and in a more committed way than any of us really intended.” In Colin Hanton’s estimation, “The band quickly became John and Paul. Even when someone didn’t turn up to rehearse, John and Paul would be at it, harmonizing or arranging material, practicing, either at Aunt Mimi’s or at Paul’s house.”

  No doubt about it, they were tuned to the same groove. Still, their personalities were different. Where John was impatient and careless, Paul was a perfectionist. Where John was moody and aloof, Paul was outgoing and irrepressibly cheerful. Where John was straightforward if brutally frank, Paul practiced diplomacy. Where John was struggling to become a musician, Paul seemed born to it. And John gave Paul someone to look up to. He had a style that awed people and set things in motion. “After a while, they’d finish each other’s sentences,” Eric Griffiths remembered. “That’s when we knew how strong their friendship had become. They’d grown dependent on one another.”

  Thereafter, it was John and Paul who brought all the new material to the Quarry Men. They assigned each musician his part, they chose the songs—they literally dictated how rehearsals went down. “Say the wrong thing, contradict them, and you were frozen out,” recalled Colin Hanton. “A look would pass between them, and afterwards it was as if you didn’t exist.”

  Throughout the rest of the year, the two boys reinforced their collaboration. Paul especially began to distinguish himself on guitar. He had a real feel for the instrument, not just for strumming it but for subtle things like vamping on the strings with the heel of his hand and accenting chords with single bass notes. John’s technique was more spontaneous, more relaxed. “He had a way of just banging out a few chords and making it sound cool,” observed one of his friends. “Any song, no matter if he knew it or not—John would barrel right through it.”