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  “That’s the music that brought me from the provinces of England to the world,” John recalled later. “That’s what made me what I am.”

  It was an unusual passion for a boy raised by archguardians who were by all accounts unmusical and by an aunt who not only disdained popular music but banished it futilely from the house. The Smiths kept an old fruitwood radiogram in the parlor of their Menlove Avenue house when John was growing up, but they rarely, if ever, burdened it with anything but one of the old 78s they’d acquired of Sir Thomas Beecham conducting Handel or Bach. The Smiths’ trusty radio dial rarely strayed from the BBC’s indomitable frequencies. As a result, John picked up much of what he learned from friends and, somewhat later, from his own precious transistor radio, which was displayed like priceless art in his bedroom.

  The fresh air and easygoing lifestyle that had drawn families to Woolton from Liverpool center now drew John outside, not to escape his radio but to further connect with its transmissions. Each summer day, he’d meet up with his friends at a place they’d nicknamed “the Bank,” an easy slope of grass with a view of the surrounding fields and lake, which served as their lookout in lovely Calderstones Park. No meeting time was prearranged, and none of the boys wore watches, but by eleven or twelve each morning they’d have turned up there on their bicycles—John, Pete Shotton, Len Garry, and Bill Turner. From atop the Bank, the world was theirs; they had an incomparable vantage point and could survey the distant expanse of close-cropped lawns and magnificent gorges, where children played leisurely in unorganized groups and teenagers prowled the faded footpaths leading in and out of the wooded groves. The view was unobstructed, stretching far off across to the main administrative building, once an elegant Victorian mansion that now housed a café, and to the left, where boats idled on a mirror-smooth lake. Yet however much the action beckoned, the Woolton boys chose not to explore it. “We savored the pleasure of just being friends,” Pete Shotton explains, with rightful significance. “Our fifteenth birthdays were approaching. We had just discovered what girls were about, and more than anything else we’d all taken an avid interest in music.”

  This interest was reinforced by the sudden appearance of a musical instrument, a Hohner harmonica, which had apparently been a gift from one of Aunt Mimi’s student lodgers, and also by Len Garry, an easygoing, imperturbable boy who “was always singing or whistling.” The boys would hunker down and burst into versions of “Bubbles” and “Cool Water,” songs that fit a schoolboy’s romantic vision of a real man’s world. Reclining on the grass against their overturned bikes, they’d wait for the harmonica’s long, slurry cue, 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…” At first, John never sang; he was too self-conscious. But as the sessions became less intimidating and more unrestrained, he was encouraged by the vigorous prompting of his friends. The boys’ musical taste stretched out considerably, thanks to overworked jukeboxes at Hilda’s Chip Shop and the Dutch Café, where among their many discoveries were crooners such as Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Under the influence of the earthy, if gratuitously slick, Laine, the boys would wait until the Bank’s sight lines grew clear, then burst out singing: “I’m just a-walkin’ in the rain…,” strangling each syllable with burbles of imagined heartbreak.

  Other friends may have shared their love of singing, but if they did, no one dared let on. “It wasn’t manly,” Pete Shotton says flatly, especially singing ballads, which did not fit the image of a typical swaggering Liverpool lad “who would just as soon fight you as look at you.” That was another reason for occupying the Bank; it gave them enough high ground to practice sharp-sighted vigilance. “When one of us saw someone coming, we’d drop our heads and the harmonica would disappear.”

  Whatever his fears, John adored playing the harmonica and had become a familiar sight pedaling his bicycle around the streets of Woolton Village “with his trousers tucked in his socks… [and] the harmonica sticking out of his back pocket.” Nigel Walley recalls, “It was the first indication [among our friends] of anyone having anything to do with music. Walk anywhere and you’d see [John] coming down the road—just the figure of him—and would hear that mouth organ going.”

  As far as a musical baptism went, John had already waded into the shallow end. He’d picked up the accordion as a child but soon grew tired of playing lightweight fare like “Greensleeves” and “Moulin Rouge.” The harmonica gave him access to his own music, the songs boys his own age were listening to, a better fit for the sound he wanted. But there were limits. Harmonicas were fun, yet you couldn’t play one and sing at the same time. This disturbed John, who by the year’s end had shown more confidence in his voice during the sing-alongs on the Bank. He also continued to grapple with embarrassment. Looking surprisingly harried, his eyes corkscrewed tightly, he wheeled his bike closer to Pete’s so that no one would overhear their conversation. “They say you’re a sissy,” John started, hedging, “but you’re not a sissy, right? Singing’s all right.”

  That was the way Lennon broached iffy subjects: obliquely so that he could recover, or simply retreat, from taking a compromising position. More than almost anything, John Lennon dreaded appearing weak or unmanly.

  Pete learned to read his friend’s ambivalence with exquisite care. Earlier the same summer, John had raised another suggestion that required careful consideration before issuing a response. The two boys had been biking around the neighborhood, when suddenly John pulled to the curb and did a subtle 180 with his eyes. Steadying his voice, he said, “Do you, uh, fancy, uh, learning to dance, Pete?” He persuaded Pete to enroll secretly with him in a “proper dancing class” held weekly at Vernon Johnson’s School of Dancing, a sturdy sandstone youth center on the Allerton Road, near Penny Lane. Here, the word proper meant formal attire, in the style of ballroom dancing that had been a popular Liverpool pastime for as long as anyone could remember. Pete borrowed one of his elder brother Ernest’s suits, which practically engulfed him in folds of spare drapery; John wore a sport coat and “proper trousers” that Aunt Mimi had bought in the hope that one day he’d wear them to regular church service. Together, they must have cut an endearing if slightly comical picture, setting out at dusk, as they did, from the corner of Menlove Avenue: two natty little men, staking their claim on grown-up society.

  Earlier in the year, another schoolmate, Eric Griffiths, had tried to teach them to jive—or “kerbopping,” as Pete and John called it. When it came to dancing, Griffiths was a natural. He’d picked up the steps from an elder sister who frequented local jazz clubs where resident fans seemed to dance the latest rages. After school, the boys descended on the Griffiths’ house on Halewood Drive, around the corner from Mimi’s, where, according to Eric, “we’d put on a few records and practice dancing. We’d jive with each other—me leading, trying to get them to do the right steps.” But John, says Griffiths, “could never work out the rhythm.”

  “We did the steps, we were learning [how] to dance,” Pete recalls. “But John was the world’s worst dancer, like a stiff cardboard box.” It mystified Pete why his friend wanted to torture himself this way.

  One night, as soon as the music had ended and the students began to disperse, the boys wandered back to the cloakroom to retrieve their jackets, when suddenly the lights flickered off. Pete stumbled around, groping fitfully in the darkness until his arms wrapped around something soft and pleasurable; with near-flawless confidence, a girl kissed him earnestly on the mouth. The pure surprise of the embrace in such an unlikely setting could not have escaped the rascal in Pete Shotton. He’d assumed the girls who attended the classes were “modest and respectable.” Eventually, to his dismay, the lights came back on. Pete glanced across the room, to where John was standing—and grinning—at him, another pretty, like-minded girl clamped snugly to his hip. “That’s when I realized why he’d dragged me there,” Shotton says.

  What made the episode so me
morable for Shotton was his realization that somehow John Lennon had engineered the encounter. John did not wait for situations to come to him—he created them. And never would this be more strikingly clear than in the following year.

  [II]

  In September, John returned for his final stint at Quarry Bank, burdened by the dismal prospect of another year in school. He remained anchored in the lowly C stream, “with the thick lads,” which proved a constant source of embarrassment, but whereas in the past he had struggled to stay afloat, he no longer pretended to be interested in studying and simply gave up. The classes he was assigned to—English, history, geography, math, science, and French—held absolutely no interest for him. And phys. ed. was anathema. Rod Davis, the future Quarry Man who served as swim-team captain, persuaded John to join the school relay team, where he shined in the crawl stroke, “but eventually,” reports Davis, “he just drifted off.”

  Ironically, the one skill that brought him such pleasure went unsupported—and John resented it. “I was obviously musical from very early,” John recalled, “and I wonder why nobody ever did anything about it….” It might have solved some basic developmental problems had a friend or teacher suggested that he transfer to the Liverpool College of Art, which offered an entry-level “junior” program to talented fourteen-year-olds (and where his future wife, Cynthia, was matriculated), but astounding though it might seem, he was unaware of its existence.

  Having given up any pretense of academic pursuit, he was content to bide time. There was nothing in school, academically or extracurricularly, that captured his imagination, no teacher willing to address his obvious estrangement. Most days he sat in class, scribbling distractedly in the borders of his exercise book, making crude line drawings that expressed his contempt for society. His targets were authority figures and institutions that symbolized his own shortcomings: families were dead ends, marriages plainly unromantic, the church a font of hypocrisy; children were depicted with various deformities, teachers appeared as bumblers. As schoolmates responded to the cartoons that landed furtively on their desks, he turned up the frequency in a desperate effort to provoke a reaction.

  The upshot of this attention-getting device was a compendium of drawings, accompanied by a few nonsensical stories that drew upon puns and unconventional wordplay spiked with obscenities. Some of the contents were no more than a few pages of simplistic illustrated stories designed to produce rude laughs, including a takeoff on Davy Crockett titled “The Story of Davy Crutch-Head” and sketchy marginalia. But there were also flashes of brilliance, truly inspired entries that foreshadowed the talent to come. One item in particular, “The Land of the Lunapots,” written in a relaxed, colorful, pidgin Scots dialect, succeeded in blending conventional poetry with splashes of pure garbled nonsense:

  T’was custard time and as I

  Snuffed at the haggis pie pie

  The noodles ran about my plunk

  Which rode my wyrtle uncle drunk

  T’was not the dreaded thrilling thud

  That made the porridge taste like mud

  T’was Wilburs graftiens graffen Bing

  That makes black pudding want to sing

  For them in music can be heard

  Like the dying cough of a humming bird

  The lowland chick astound agasted

  Wonder how long it lasted

  In this land of Lunapots

  I who sail the earth in paper yachts.

  John’s body of work, eventually known in school as “The Daily Howl,” was greatly influenced by John’s friend and neighbor Ivan Vaughan, whose own version made its appearance in the form of a tearsheet months earlier at the Liverpool Institute of Art, where he studied classics with Paul McCartney. Ivan was a “lovely mutt of a guy,” tall and gangly, whose oddball qualities made him immensely attractive; there was no menace in his eccentricity, only charm. Vaughan was always in motion, the flip side of John: vivacious, intellectual, ambitious, confident, and extremely sincere. “He was his own man, so outstandingly different [and] outrageous,” says Don Andrew, a classmate of Vaughan’s and later a member of Liverpool’s pop band the Remo Four. “Everyone wanted to [be able to] say: ‘I’m Ive’s mate.’ ” It was Ivan who introduced John to The Goon Show, a half-hour potpourri of way-out humor and double-talk featuring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe that was broadcast weekly on the BBC’s Home Service, beginning in 1951. Of all the boys John had encountered, until he met Paul McCartney (to whom he would be introduced by Ivan), Vaughan came closest to his idea of “an original.”

  The unlikely pair spent many evenings in Aunt Mimi’s parlor, dreaming up sketches for “The Daily Howl.” In typical Goon fashion, they lampooned teachers whose idiosyncrasies were ripe for exaggeration; warts, humps, gargantuan noses, claws, and assorted deformities were grafted onto caricatures that John drew with gusto. “It was so smooth and easy for him,” Pete Shotton recalls. “Without it, I’m not sure what trouble he would have gotten himself into.”

  By January 1956, however, John had pretty much solved that riddle.

  [III]

  John’s musical interests had remained undefined through the first half of the 1950s. He listened with captive indifference to the banal hit-parade vocalists who performed on the BBC, but there had been little, if anything, that genuinely excited him. That changed drastically in early 1956, when, with Radio Luxembourg’s help, he feasted on “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” by Bill Haley, “You Don’t Have to Go,” by Jimmy Reed, “Such a Night,” by the Drifters, Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” and a pared-down version of “Maybelline,” by Chuck Berry, who was emerging as a bona fide star. John was mesmerized by the big, aggressive beat and the tidal spill of lyrics. But like so many teenagers John’s age, it was Elvis Presley who really captured his imagination.

  Radio Luxembourg had played Elvis’s version of “That’s All Right (Mama)” sporadically—and without much fanfare—through the latter part of 1955, following it with “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” to much the same result, but it wasn’t until the spring of 1956, with the debut of “Heartbreak Hotel,” that 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.” “Heartbreak Hotel” set off an emotional groundswell. It is not difficult to appreciate the song’s immense impact; the provocative lyric, offset by ferocious despair and Elvis’s convulsive, wounded delivery, was a potent stimulus to a young English boy’s awkward dreams and desires.

  “Nothing really affected me until Elvis,” John told Hunter Davies in 1968. It was not simply a boyish infatuation or a distraction; Elvis’s music spoke to John in a way that nothing ever had before. Pete Shotton recalls discussing Elvis with John. “Heartbreak Hotel” “was the most exciting thing [we’d] ever heard.” Without question, he says, “it was the spark, and then the whole world opened up for us.” John bought into the whole novel package: the look, the sound, and the spirit of his performance. No one other than Paul McCartney would have a more tangible influence on John’s development until he fell under the spell of Yoko Ono in 1967. “That was him,” Paul has said of his own opportune discovery of Elvis Presley, “that was the guru we’d been waiting for. The Messiah had arrived.”

  Like an earnest disciple, John reacted with missionary devotion. The “Presley image” had already landed Merseyside, as John could see by the sprinkling of teddy boys who capered about like gargoyles at local dances. The teds had been on the fringe of British society since 1954, when a series of violent incidents involving juvenile delinquents dressed in long Edwardian jackets crept steadily into the press. The teds personified a classic example of adolescent rebellion; they drank, brawled, screwed, defied convention, and acted out by dressing like ghoulish undertakers. The uniform, in particular, drew critical attention to their rarefied ranks. Its mongrel style was adapted from a fusion of postwar London homosexuals, who wore velvet half collars on Edwardian jackets, with the
biker gangs as depicted by Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One. A bootstring tie was added for effect, along with skintight jeans, called drainpipes or “drainies,” spongy crepe-soled shoes known as “brothel creepers,” muttonchop sideburns, and long hair greased liberally and combed forward to a point that bisected the middle of the forehead. Seasoned with a dose of aggressive rock ’n roll, the result was a new specimen of teenager. All it took for a middle-class kid like John to make that leap was to put on the clothes.

  Shotton and Lennon began by acquiring brassy “Tony Curtises,” lopping off shanks of each other’s hair in John’s bedroom one afternoon when Mimi was out of the house and then applying enough Vaseline to hold a Woody Woodpecker–shaped quiff in place. “We’d heard about [a] place [in Liverpool], which was the teds’ shop,” Shotton recalls, outlining their plan to mimic the elaborate wardrobe. After school, still in their school blazers, John and Pete hopped on the no. 4 bus to the city center and walked the short distance to London Road, where a “little Jewish tailor” had assembled a spectacular selection of these accessories. “They had the most glorious clothes [we’d] ever seen in our life [sic]. It was wonderful!” Within a week, John had shucked his casual chinos for a pair of bona fide drainies, trained his hair straight back, in a defiant “DA,” or duck’s ass, and grown bushy “sidies.”

  By the middle of 1956, after a volatile courtship with both Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, the UK gave birth to the first British pop event. Tommy Steele was the perfect stand-in for the American prototype, part pop idol, part show-business proxy, with an engine that ran on charisma. Unlike Presley, who had burst from obscurity on the strength of his bombshell voice and persona, Tommy Steele was the product of elaborate backstage designs. A merchant seaman born Tommy Hicks, he was “discovered” in the loosest sense of the word, singing in a Regent Street club called the Stork Room, in London. There was nothing groundbreaking about his performance, nothing particularly original or outlandish. Even his repertoire was a mixed bag of harmless folk songs put through the metal-edged PA system and reconstituted as low-grade rock ’n roll. But it was obvious from the moment the lights hit Tommy that “he had enormous presence.” He lit up the entire room. Larry Parnes, who went on to become one of the pioneer impresarios of the British pop world and who unwittingly gave the Beatles their first break, retooled Steele’s image and launched his young protégé as “the British Elvis Presley,” kicking off a marketing blitz that boasted a Decca recording contract, several well-placed television appearances, and a bit part in the mainstream movie Kill Me Tomorrow. Steele’s first record, the absurdly titled “Rock with the Caveman,” was a dismal stab at the idiom, thus alienating his intended public. Nevertheless, for two years he managed to draw the crowds that would eventually turn to harder-edged fare for sustenance. To his credit, he looked like a young boy and worked like an old hand. Eventually, Parnes yanked him from the harsh glare of rock ’n roll into a more subdued spotlight, headlining variety shows on the Moss Empire circuit, where he could cut loose, so to speak, without soiling his professional image. In the end, Steele had proved not so much untalented as too slick to be taken seriously.