Shout! (12 page)

They had the consolation of knowing that, however bad they might sound at the beginning, they did not sound much worse than professional English rock ’n’ rollers. Tommy Steele, launched in 1956 as
Britain’s “answer” to Elvis Presley, had set the pattern of clumsy mimicry. Since then, there had arisen numerous other “answers” to Presley as well as to the Everly Brothers, Bill Haley, the Platters, and Little Richard. There had been Marty Wilde, the Most Brothers, Russ Hamilton, Tony Crombie, and the Rockets. Some found hit records and a large following that, for all that, regarded them much as an earlier generation had regarded British films. They were poor substitutes for the real elixir, pumped from its only true source: America.

Liverpool stood closer to America than any other place in Britain. There was still, in 1957, a transatlantic passenger route, plied by ships returning weekly to tie up behind Dock Road’s grim castle walls. With them came young Liverpudlian deckhands and stewards whom the neighbors called “Cunard Yanks” because of their flashy New York clothes. As well as Times Square trinkets for their girlfriends and panoramic lampshades of the Manhattan skyline for their mothers’ front rooms, the Cunard Yanks brought home records not available in Britain. Rhythm and blues, the genesis of rock ’n’ roll, sung by still obscure names such as Chuck Berry and Ike Turner, pounded through the back streets of row houses each Saturday night as the newly returned mariners got ready to hit the town.

The Quarry Men knew no friendly Cunard Yank who would bring them American records to copy. They had no money, either, for the new electric guitars and amplifiers now thronging Hessy’s shop window. They could not even change their name, as all the other groups were doing. The Alan Caldwell Skiffle Group had become Rory Storm and the Raving Texans. The Gerry Marsden Skiffle Group now called themselves Gerry and the Pacemakers. The Quarry Men stayed the Quarry Men because that was the name lettered on Colin Hanton’s drums.

In late 1957, American rock ’n’ roll gave struggling ex-skiffle groups in Britain their first friend. His name was Buddy Holly, although at the beginning he figured anonymously in a group called the Crickets. Among the new performers thrown up after Presley, Buddy Holly was unique in composing many of the songs he recorded, and also in showing ability on the guitar, rather than using it merely as a prop. He gave hope to British boys because he was not pretty, but thin and bespectacled, and because his songs, though varied and inventive, were written in elementary guitar chords, recognizable to every beginner.

Paul McCartney had always used his guitar to help him make up
tunes. His main objective in the Quarry Men, however, was to oust Eric Griffiths from the role of lead guitarist. One night at the Broadway Conservative Club he prevailed on the others to let him take the solo in a number. He fluffed it and, later, in an attempt to redeem himself, played over to John a song he had written, called “I Lost My Little Girl.” John, though he had always tinkered with lyrics, had never thought of writing entire songs before. Egged on by Paul—and by Buddy Holly—he felt there could be no harm in trying. Soon he and Paul were each writing songs furiously, as if it were a race.

Sometimes, when the Quarry Men played at Wilson Hall, they would be watched by a boy whose elaborate Teddy-Boy hair stood up around a pale, hollow-cheeked, unsmiling face. The others knew him vaguely as a schoolfriend of Paul’s and a would-be guitarist, though he played with no group regularly. His name, so Paul said, was George Harrison, and, in Paul’s opinion, he would be extremely useful as a recruit to the Quarry Men. No one, to begin with, took very much notice. For Paul’s friend was so silent and solemn and, at fourteen, so ridiculously young.

Paul had gotten to know him years before, when the McCartneys still lived at Speke and George used to catch the same bus to school each morning from the stop near Upton Green. Among the shouting, satchel-swinging crowd George Harrison was known as the boy whose dad actually drove one of these pale green Corporation buses. When Paul, one morning, was short of his full fare, George’s mother gave him extra pennies, enough to travel all the way into Liverpool.

The Harrisons, Harry and Louise, had married in 1929 when she worked in a greengrocer’s shop and he was a seaman on ships of the White Star line. The thin, dapper, thoughtful young shipboard waiter proved a perfect match with the jolly, warm-hearted young woman whose mother had been a lamplighter during the Great War. In 1931, a daughter, Louise, was born to them and, in 1934, their first son, Harold Junior. Harry quit the sea soon afterward, braving the worst of the Depression to be nearer his wife and children. After fifteen months on the dole he managed to get a job with the corporation, initially as a bus conductor. A third child, Peter, was born in 1940, at the height of the Liverpool Blitz.

The family lived then at Wavertree, in the tiny row house in Arnold
Grove that Harry and Louise had occupied since their marriage. It was here, on February 25, 1943, that Louise gave birth to her fourth child and third son, George. When Harry came upstairs to see the new baby, he was amazed at its likeness to himself. Louise, too, noticed the dark eyes that, even then, cautiously appraised the world.

Though Harry earned little on the buses, he made sure his large family lacked for nothing. Louise was a capable and also a happy mother, whose laughter rang constantly through the house. George, as the baby of the family, was petted by everyone, from his big sister Lou downward. Accustomed to being the center of attention, he was, at the same time, independent, solitary, and thoughtful. Even as a toddler he forbade Louise to go with him to school, for fear she would get mixed up with “all those nosy mothers.” It horrified him to think they might ask her what he did and said at home.

The wartime baby “bulge” had brought in its wake an acute shortage of space at primary schools. George—like his mother—had been baptized a Catholic, but could be fitted in only at an Anglican nursery school, Dovedale Primary, near Penny Lane. He was there at the same time as John Lennon. Though the age-gap was too great for them ever to become friendly.

In 1954, George went on to Liverpool Institute, where he was put into the form below Paul McCartney. Unlike Paul, however, he soon began to do extremely badly. Alert and perceptive, with an unusually good memory, he developed a hatred of all lessons and school routine. Detentions, even beatings, could not lift the firmly shut barriers of his indifference, and soon his teachers found it less fatiguing to leave him alone.

He acquired further disreputability by coming to school in clothes that did not conform to the Institute’s regulation gray and black. Already, in admiration of the dockland Teds, his hair was piled so high that a school cap could only cling on precariously at the back. He would sit in class, his blazer buttoned over a canary yellow waistcoat borrowed from his brother Harry, his desk-top hiding trousers secretly tapered on his mother’s sewing machine. His shirt collar, socks, and shoes growing pointed all uttered the defiance still hidden in his gaunt face while some master or other, like “Cissy” Smith, was sarcastically making fun of him.

In 1956, his mother noticed him drawing pictures of guitars on every scrap of paper he could find. He had heard Lonnie Donegan, and seen Donegan’s guitar. Soon afterward, he came to Louise and asked her to give
him three pounds to buy a guitar from a boy at school. She did so, but when George brought it home, he accidentally unscrewed the neck from the body, then found he couldn’t put them back together. The guitar lay in a cupboard for weeks until his brother Peter took it out and mended it.

Learning to play even the first simple chords in the tuition book was an agonizing process for George. Unlike Paul, he had no inherited musical ability; nor was he, like John, a born adventurer. All he had was his indomitable will to learn. His mother encouraged him, sitting up late with him as he tried and tried. Sometimes he would be near to tears with frustration and the pain of his split and dusty fingertips.

His brother Peter had taken up the guitar at about the same time, and together they formed a skiffle group, the Rebels. Their first and only engagement was for ten shillings each at the Speke British Legion Club. At George’s insistence, they left the house one at a time, ducking along under the garden hedge so that “nosy neighbors” wouldn’t see.

The family had moved by now to a new council house, in Upton Green, Speke. It was on his bus journey into Liverpool each morning that George met Paul McCartney. Though Paul was a year older and in a higher grade at school, their passion for guitars drew them together. Paul would come across from Allerton to practice in George’s bedroom, bringing with him his ’cello guitar with the upside-down scratch plate. George now had a guitar that his mother had helped him buy for thirty pounds—a far better one than Paul’s, with white piping and a cutaway for reaching the narrow frets at the bottom of the neck.

To pay back his mother George did a Saturday morning delivery round for a local butcher, E. R. Hughes. One of the houses on his round belonged to a family named Bramwell, whose son Tony had met Buddy Holly during the star’s recent British tour. Tony Bramwell would lend George his Buddy Holly records to listen to and copy. Confidence came from the songs built of easy chords, like E and B7; the changes he could do now from one chord to the other; the solo bass runs that, painfully, unsmilingly, he was learning to pick out for himself.

Paul introduced him to the other Quarry Men one night late in 1957, in the suburb of Liverpool called Old Roan. “It was at a club we used to go to, called the Morgue,” Colin Hanton says. “It was in the cellar of this big old derelict house. No bar or coffee or anything, just a cellar with dark rooms off it, and one big blue lightbulb sticking out of the wall.”

The others crowded round George, interested in what they could see of his guitar with its cutaway body. They listened while George played all he had been carefully rehearsing. He played them “Raunchy,” an eight-note tune on the bass strings; then he played the faster and more tricky “Guitar Boogie Shuffle.”

George was not asked to join the Quarry Men that night. Indeed, they never asked him formally to join. He would follow them with his guitar around the halls where they played, and in the interval stand and wait for his chance to come across and see Paul. Generally, he would have some newly mastered chord to show them, or yet another solemn-faced bass string tune. If another guitarist had failed to arrive, George would be allowed to sit in.

No one other than Paul took him very seriously. John Lennon in particular, from the pinnacle of seventeen years, considered him just a funny little eager white-faced lad who delivered the weekend meat. Even George’s ability as a guitarist became a reason for John to tease him. “Come on, George,” he would say. “Give us ‘Raunchy.’” George played “Raunchy” whenever John asked him to, even sitting on the top deck of the number 500 bus to Speke.

The great benefit of letting George tag along was that it brought the Quarry Men another safe house in which to practice. At weekends or on truant days they could always find refuge at George’s. Mr. Harrison would be out on the buses, but Louise always welcomed them, never minding the noise. She developed a soft spot for John Lennon, in whom she recognized much of her own scatty humor. She used to say that John and she were just a pair of fools.

Aunt Mimi, by contrast, did not like John to associate with someone who was, after all, a butcher’s errand boy, and whose accent was so thickly Liverpudlian. George called at Mendips one day to ask John to go to the cinema, but John, still thinking him just a “bloody kid,” pretended to be too busy. “He’s a real whacker, isn’t he?” Mimi said bitterly when George had gone. “You always go for the low types, don’t you, John?”

To Mimi, in her innocence, George—and even Paul—were the bad influences: If John had not met
them
he would still be happy in ordinary clothes. “Paul used to wear these
great
long winklepicker things, with buckles on the sides. And as for
George
! Well, of course you couldn’t wish for a quieter lad. But one day when I came into the house,
there was George with his hair in a crew cut, and wearing this
bright
pink shirt. I told him,
‘Never
come into this house with a shirt like that on again.’”

With George sitting in more and more, the Quarry Men now found themselves with a glut of guitarists. For, as well as John and Paul, there was still Eric Griffiths, the chubby-faced boy who had been a founder member, and who did not realize his growing superfluousness. At length, the others decided that Eric must be frozen out. Colin Hanton, his best friend in the group, was visited by Nigel Walley and asked to go along with the plan. They still needed Colin or, rather, his drum set that cost thirty-eight pounds.

“We didn’t tell Eric we were going to Paul’s house to practice,” Colin says. “He rang up while we were there. The others got me to talk to him and explain how things stood. Eric was pretty upset. He couldn’t understand why they’d suddenly decided to get rid of him. I told him there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. I could tell that if they wanted somebody out, he was out.”

Between John and Aunt Mimi, the atmosphere had grown increasingly turbulent. Mimi had to support him at art college for a full year until he qualified for a local authority grant; she therefore felt doubly entitled to pronounce adversely on his clothes, his silly music, and the friends who were, in Mimi’s opinion, so very ill-attired and unsuitable. Pete Shotton was only one of John’s friends who witnessed memorable fights between him and the aunt who so resembled him in strength of will and volatile spirits. “One minute,” Pete says, “they’d be yelling and screaming at each other; the next they’d have their arms round each other, laughing.”

Behind Mimi’s briskness and sarcasm lay the real dread of losing John. She was only a substitute, as she well knew, for his real mother, her sister Julia. And John, in his teenage years, had grown adept at playing on that fear. After a row at Mendips, he would storm out and go straight to Julia’s house, remaining there for days, sometimes weeks on end. With Julia, life was always pleasant and carefree. Having made no sacrifice for him, she bore no grudge against his indolence: she pampered him, bought him unsuitable clothes, and made him laugh. Her man friend, John Dykins, would frequently press on him a handful of the evening’s restaurant tips.