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  Sometime in late February, Paul began learning an instrumental called “Raunchy,” playing the melody line over and over until it was nearly note-perfect. But there was more to it than simply learning the song. He had heard another boy play it, a fifteen-year-old schoolmate whom he had befriended two years earlier, and he wanted to master the song to maintain their friendly rivalry. He almost had it down, but it wasn’t quite there yet. And not until it was dead-on would he play it for George Harrison.

  • • • • •

  Even before he met Paul McCartney, George Harrison had demonstrated that he was not to be outperformed when it came to the guitar.

  One day when he was just thirteen years old, George and his best friend, Arthur Kelly, were practicing a version of a skiffle hit they’d learned from listening to a record. Because they’d only recently taken up the guitar, Arthur said, “We could barely switch chords, let alone do anything fancy.” But when they got to the middle part, George lit into the difficult lead, galloping through the break, leaving Arthur dazzled. “We’d only heard the song two or three times, but George had somehow memorized it. He just inhaled those notes and played them back perfectly, at the same speed as on the record.” As Arthur soon realized, George was a natural when it came to the guitar.

  As a teenager, the slight, spindly George Harrison was a detached, introspective boy with dark, expressive eyes, huge ears, and a mischievous smile that seized his whole face with a kind of wolfish delight. Although he was by no means a loner, he was outwardly shy, and it was the kind of shyness so inhibiting that it was often misinterpreted as arrogance. He tended to disappear within himself, to give away as little as possible. Friends from the neighborhood were less eloquent, remembering him as someone who “blended in with the scenery.” George was “a quieter, more taciturn kind of guy” than other blokes, according to another acquaintance, “but he was pretty tough as well.” There was nothing in his development that hinted at the witty, disarming Beatle whose spontaneous antics would transform press conferences into stand-up comedy.

  Unlike Paul’s family, the unworldly Harrisons offered George little in the way of academic enrichment, nothing that would jump-start a young man’s imagination. Nor did they have the kind of high-toned pretensions that Mimi had for John. Like many of the hard-nosed port people who were resettled in the Liverpool suburbs in the 1930s, they were content just to enjoy their upgraded lifestyle—not to “rock the boat,” in the wisdom of a Harrison family slogan—rather than to reach for the stars.

  Like Freddie Lennon, George’s father, Harry, had grown up around the Liverpool docks, enchanted by their gritty romance and faraway lure. By the age of seventeen, he was already trolling the seas for the fancy White Star Line, living between a series of exotic ports. He met George’s mother, Louise, while on shore leave in Liverpool and married her the next year, struggling to stay afloat financially. The birth of two children—also named Harry and Louise—made things extremely difficult on twenty-five bob (shillings) a week, which was inadequate to support them.

  It took almost two years of scraping by until Harry landed another job, working as a streetcar conductor and then driver on the Speke-Liverpool route. He loved bus driving from the first day he slipped behind the wheel, and in thirty-one years on the job, there was never a day in which he regarded it as anything but a sacred, businesslike obligation.

  Within four years, the Harrisons had another boy, Peter, and then George was born, on February 25, 1943. He was an unnaturally beautiful child. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, with skin like polished bone and a lean-jawed face that favored his father’s features, he quickly developed the kind of strong armor that protects the youngest sibling from getting constantly picked on.

  Liverpool ferries, 1954. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

  The Harrisons were a boisterous crew—good-natured boisterous. “They’d yell at each other and swear around the [dinner] table,” recalled Arthur Kelly. There was a good deal of taunting and ridiculing one another—none of which was expressed with any unpleasantness. In fact, Kelly said, he was envious of their noisy interaction, the earthy way they expressed their affections. “I enjoyed being there… because with all the uproar they were very much a family.”

  Like Paul’s family, the Harrisons moved from the city to Speke. Living in a suburb seemed fantastic to George because it meant space and a chance to develop his own identity. George couldn’t have been happier. He went to nearby Dovedale Primary, which John Lennon had also attended, where he was a decent pupil with good manners, and he passed a scholarship exam with a good enough score to assure himself a coveted place in one of Liverpool’s elite high schools. That alone was reason to celebrate in the Harrison family. George’s father talked tirelessly about the importance of a good education and how hard work in school was the only way to escape a dreadful life of poverty and physical labor. None of George’s siblings had their heart set on going to college, but George gave his father a glimmer of hope that at least one of his children would go to college and make something of himself.

  And while part of that dream would be fulfilled, it would be about as far from the halls of ivy as a boy could reasonably stray.

  • • • • •

  Within weeks of entering the prestigious Liverpool Institute—the same school as Paul—George Harrison altered the course of his life in ways that no one could have predicted. He was marked for trouble from the start. Uncooperative, indifferent, and unmotivated in class, immature and stubborn to the point of rebelliousness, he was adrift in a school that stressed discipline and conformity. Already testing authority, George wore bold checkered shirts, pants that were so tight they were called “drainpipes,” and blue suede shoes. His hair, which had grown extravagantly long—long enough for his father to label him “a refugee from a Tarzan movie”—was plastered back with palmfuls of gel to make it behave and topped with sugar water so that it would dry like Sheetrock. “Basically, George and I were a couple of outcasts,” Arthur Kelly said. Sometimes George and Arthur simply “sagged off” school to smoke cigarettes and eat French fries in a nearby movie theater that played endless cartoons. “From about the age of thirteen,” Kelly said, “all we were interested in was rock ’n roll.”

  George threw himself into music with the furious energy of someone trying to escape a terrible trap. According to Arthur Kelly, he took a few basic guitar lessons “from a bloke who lived around the corner,” then formed a skiffle band, called the Rebels, with Kelly, mostly for laughs. It is no coincidence that his Radio Luxembourg favorites were the exact same songs that captivated John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with the exception that George was also drawn to guitarists whose twangy riffs were the bedrock of rock ’n roll tradition. He paid a lot of attention to the way these performers played, the phrasing and shading that made their songs so immediately recognizable.

  Arthur Kelly and George Harrison (age twelve), just days after George got his first guitar. COURTESY OF ARTHUR KELLY

  Said Colin Manley, who with George was considered one of the best guitar players at the Liverpool Institute, “He knew how to color a riff, which none of us even considered trying to do before. It was so different, so inventive—and serious. It’s difficult to understand how unusual that was at the time. Most of us wanted to just play that damn instrument, but George was out to conquer it.” His success as a guitarist, Manley said, was due to hours of painstaking, monotonous practice bent over the frets. “He used to come over to my house, put a record on, and we’d play a passage over and over again until we’d mastered it. George studied guitar the way someone else would a scientific theory. And it challenged him in the same way.”

  Unfortunately, George’s grades plunged as he improved on guitar. He’d stopped studying altogether and concentrated solely on playing music. Only occasionally did he put in an appearance at school, and when he showed up at all, trouble followed. He had few friends there, but one he eventually made proved especially important.

 
A double-decker bus, 1956. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS

  As George recounted, “I’d met Paul on the bus, coming back from school,” at the end of 1956. Paul shared George’s interest in music, and the two spent afternoons practicing guitar. Most Liverpool Institute upperclassmen never mixed with the younger students, but for George, with his interest in rock ’n roll and undeniable talent, Paul felt the affection of an older brother. He watched over George in school and dragged him along on a couple of social outings. But friends though they were, Paul kept his business with the Quarry Men quite separate. George heard only passing remarks about the band.

  It wasn’t until March 12, 1958, that George was invited to hear the Quarry Men at the opening of a skiffle club called the Morgue. George arrived carrying his beat-up guitar. Paul made introductions, and he could see from John’s reaction that fifteen-year-old George was too young, “just a schoolkid.” Paul was almost sixteen and John was seventeen, so the difference was huge as far as John was concerned. With little prompting, George pulled out his guitar and auditioned for the other boys. “The lads were very impressed,” recalled Eric Griffiths. Colin Hanton said, “He played the guitar brilliantly—better than any of us handled an instrument—so I had no hang-up about inviting him to come around.”

  Maybe Hanton didn’t, but John did. He wanted nothing to do with a mere schoolboy and told Paul so. “George was just too young,” John recalled. “He looked even younger than Paul, and Paul looked about ten, with his baby face.” Not to be denied, Paul, who thought George was loaded with talent, engineered another “chance” meeting between John and George in, of all places, the upper deck of a Liverpool bus. Once more, George had his guitar in tow, and this time he zipped through a rendition of another difficult song. There was no way for John to exclude him any longer: George Harrison was in the band.

  Unfortunately, that spelled the end for Eric Griffiths and the other feeble guitar players who came around to play. There wasn’t any room for them with a musician like George on board. As a result, the Quarry Men got very tight.

  John, Paul, George—and Colin. They were almost there.

  • • • • •

  For almost a year after George joined the Quarry Men, living rooms and backyards were, in general, the only places in which the band played gigs. Though local dance halls and “jive” clubs actively booked acts to fill the demand for music, they showed little interest in hiring the boys.

  Frustrated by the band’s slow progress, John and Paul concentrated on practicing together every chance they got—and they hit upon a momentous discovery. Paul mentioned casually that he’d written several songs, and he played one for John, called “I Lost My Little Girl.” John was, in one friend’s estimation, “floored.” Writing songs had never occurred to him.

  Throughout the spring of 1958, John and Paul gave songwriting a try. Lo and behold, songs poured out of them at an extraordinary rate. They would begin by scrawling “A Lennon-McCartney Original” at the top of a blank sheet of paper, then jotted down anything they came up with: words, images, fragments of lyrics. Gradually, a verse would take shape, then another and another. “Lyrics didn’t really count,” John recalled, “as long as we had some vague theme: ‘She loves you, he loves her, and they love each other.’”

  By the end of the school year, a respectable number of original songs had been written down in a beat-up notebook. There were between fifteen and twenty in all, including “One After 909,” “I Call Your Name,” and “Love Me Do,” all of which would eventually be recorded by the Beatles. John was attending the Liverpool College of Art, which was next door to the Liverpool Institute, so Paul and George spent lunch hours visiting him, playing in the college cafeteria. Usually, a small crowd would gather to listen. One of the students remembered being touched by the boys’ developing talent. “They were wonderful,” she said. “They harmonized just beautifully together. Everyone appreciated having them around.”

  One sweltering-hot night in June, they played at a dinner dance, and John’s mother turned up. John had been badgering her to hear the band for some time. Julia was “absolutely overwhelmed” at the sight of John cutting loose on the stage, a guest remembered. “She couldn’t stop moving” to the music, and between the numbers she was “the only person,” said Colin Hanton, “who clapped every time—and loud. If that didn’t get things going, she put her fingers in her teeth and whistled.” She seemed genuinely proud of John and thrilled by his band.

  Even though John lived at Aunt Mimi’s, he continued to see his mother on a regular basis. The two spent long hours together, discussing everything from school to music. For all her inadequacies as a mother, Julia had a wonderful sense of dealing with a teenager. Things were also getting better between Julia and Mimi. The sisters were unfailingly loyal to each other, and Julia visited Mimi each day. They would usually have a cup of tea in Mimi’s morning room, adjacent to the kitchen, but in warmer weather they often stood in the garden and talked, sometimes lingering into the early evening.

  It was there that Nigel Walley, John’s friend and manager, found them on July 15, 1958, chatting across the garden gate. “I’d gone around to call for [John],” Nigel remembered. “It was a beautiful summer night, just getting dark. But, as it turned out, he wasn’t home.” Julia was about to leave, and Nigel offered to walk her as far as the bus stop. Sauntering down the sidewalk, Julia cracked joke after joke. When they got to the intersection, Nigel waved good-night and turned toward home. Julia crossed the avenue in the middle of the block. Seconds later, Nigel heard a screech of tires, followed by a hideous thud, and saw Julia flying through the air. For a split second, the whole world froze. Nigel tried to scream but “couldn’t get a sound out.” He ran toward where Julia had fallen, but he could see “she wasn’t moving.”

  It was just after eleven o’clock when a patrol car pulled up in front of Julia’s house, where John was. A policeman stood stiffly on the front step, his face frozen in sorrow as he told John that his mother was dead. John was consumed with grief. Thoughts of his past, of his absent father, mingled with thoughts of the present. “That’s really [ruined] everything,” he thought. “I’ve got no responsibility to anyone now.” The way John saw it, “I lost my mother twice—once as a five-year-old…and again when she actually, physically died.”

  It was logical that John would bury his sorrow in the band. “Now we were both in this, both losing our mothers,” Paul later said. “This was a bond for us, something of ours, a special thing.” In a way, Paul was right. From that day onward, he and John formed a mutual, unspoken understanding, bound by their respective sadness.

  One of the band’s few joys the next year was playing at the art college dances, which were held on Friday nights in the basement canteen. Students who recall those evenings still talk about the thrill of hearing rock ’n roll ringing off the canteen’s bare concrete walls. Said one observer: “It was as new and disturbing as anything we’d heard at school. [The Quarry Men] had a sound that just connected with us, and when that band played, the place went wild.”

  But Paul wasn’t satisfied, and neither was John. They were getting better by playing with George, but Colin wasn’t. And he didn’t fit in with their developing friendship. Paul, the perfectionist, blamed Colin for dragging the band down. After one gig, playing at a social club, there was an argument between the boys that ended badly. Colin took his drums home, saying he’d see them at the next gig. But there was no next gig, and no phone call from any of the Quarry Men. “In fact, I never saw them again,” Colin said, “until three years later, when I turned on the television and some guy was going on about a band called the Beatles.”

  • • • • •

  Adrift without a drummer, George, Paul, and John spent many nights listening to and studying the young bands in Liverpool that were getting all the work. Helplessly, they sat idle while the local music scene grew up and around them. Everywhere they turned, the rock ’n roll bandwagon was rumbling ahead. T
een clubs opened as fast as promoters could find vacant buildings to rent. Other bands worked four or five nights a week, but without a drummer, the Quarry Men couldn’t play gigs. For all intents and purposes, they were finished.

  For John, who had loved the band most, it was another emotional setback. His mother was dead; his best friend, Pete Shotton, had become preoccupied with police cadet training. And a neighborhood girlfriend had thrown in the towel and taken up with another young man. All of this brought John’s feeling of alienation into sharper focus. His friendships with two college classmates, Bill Harry and Stuart Sutcliffe, helped, although both students, unlike John, were committed to their art. Aside from Paul and George, there seemed to be no one to fill the void. His entire support system was falling apart.

  Then, a few days before the end of the school term, Cynthia Powell walked into his life.

  • • • • •

  It had never occurred to Cynthia that the “scruffy, dangerous-looking, and totally disruptive” boy who “frightened the life out” of her at art college would end up her soul mate. John Lennon was a character out of her worst nightmares, “outrageous…a rough sort” who flew so far below her social radar that his existence barely registered.

  They had been in class together for most of the year, but as the girl from the studious side of the aisle, Cynthia Powell had escaped special notice. Painfully timid, she melted into crowds like the scenery in an unfocused photograph. She was slim and delicately shaped, with good legs and a smile that puckered slightly, but her beauty was a gift she ignored.