John Lennon: pocket GIANTS

Robert Webb

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780750962339
• eBook ISBN: 9780750969116
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

John Lennon is a giant of popular music and culture. As one-quarter of the Beatles, he was in the vanguard of music, art, fashion and popular culture during the sixties. His music, humour and outspoken calls for peace inspired a generation. He stands as an iconic figure for those who lived through the sixties and seventies, as well as for those who grew up long after his untimely death in 1980. Above all, Lennon was one of the twentieth century's greatest and most important songwriters. Songs he wrote with Paul McCartney, such as 'She Loves You' and 'A Day in the Life', define an era. Others he wrote alone, such as 'God', 'Help!' and 'Revolution', betray an often complex, contradictory and troubled character. Lennon was never one to hide his love away, nor his anger, nor his convictions. In 2000 his anthem 'Imagine' was voted the song of the millennium.

1

‘Who am I Supposed to Be?’ – Childhood

I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from others. I was different all my life.

John Lennon

(in Sheff, All We Are Saying, p.156)

 

John Lennon will forever be associated with the city of Liverpool. It was where he lived for more than half of his relatively short life, where he drew his first breath, took his first steps and where he met his first loves. And the city, in turn, loved him back. In the 1960s, Lennon and the Beatles transformed the bustling, workaday Lancashire port into one of the most famous cities on the planet.

Between the wars Liverpool was thriving. It boasted over 7 miles of docks and a prosperous middle class, comfortable on the profits of maritime trade. The Stanley family lived in one the smartest residential areas, under the shadow of the city’s imposing Anglican cathedral.

George Stanley was a sailor turned respectable insurance investigator; his five daughters were anything but conventional. The Stanley sisters grew into a domineering, headstrong quintet. Mary, known to the family as Mimi, was the eldest. Then there was Julia, occasionally known as Judy. She was, according to her daughter Julia Baird, the most unusual and unpredictable of them all, often cast in later histories – somewhat inaccurately, as Baird has shown in her own book – as a frivolous, flirtatious woman.

It was the musically intrepid Julia who would in later years show her young son his first chords on the guitar. But before that, in 1938, she married a roving seaman, Alfred Lennon, the son of an Irish clerk and one-time music-hall entertainer. ‘That Alf Lennon’² was immediately unpopular with the Stanley family and none of Julia’s sisters attended their register office wedding. Alf later claimed they married just for a laugh and that he took his bride to the cinema for their honeymoon. He was a mercurial character, establishing the pattern for the marriage by sailing for the West Indies within a week of the wedding, as a ship’s steward on board one of the luxury liners that plied the Atlantic.

Julia stayed at home, receiving visits from her husband whenever he was in the country. He was on shore leave at Christmas 1939, when Julia fell pregnant. The couple’s son was born at around 6.30 p.m. the following 9 October at Oxford Street Maternity Hospital. He was named John after his paternal grandfather. Liverpool, an obvious target for German bombers, had borne the brunt of aerial attacks that week. As a patriotic gesture Julia added a middle name borrowed from Britain’s redoubtable new prime minister.

John Winston Lennon spent his early years at the Stanley family home in Newcastle Road, at No. 9 (a digit that would recur throughout Lennon’s life, from the date of his birth to the day he died). The house was not far from the orphanage where Alf himself had grown up. John’s errant father was proving to be as unreliable as the other Stanley sisters feared he would, his frequent maritime jaunts putting further strain on his and Julia’s stuttering marriage.

When Julia met another man, John ‘Bobby’ Dykins, her sister Mimi – now, with the death of their mother, the matriarch of the family – was aghast. Julia was still married to Alf and her new home with Dykins – a small flat in the Gateacre district – was, in Mimi’s emphatic opinion, an unsuitable place to raise the toddler. Mimi demanded that John be handed over to her as Julia was no longer a fit mother. When Liverpool Social Services discovered that the 5-year-old didn’t even have his own bed, let alone a bedroom, they ruled in favour of the eldest sister and John was moved across town to Mimi’s semi-detached house, ‘Mendips’, at No. 251 Menlove Avenue. Mimi and her husband George Smith, childless themselves, welcomed John into their home and for the first time the youngster began to enjoy something of a settled childhood in the quiet suburb of Woolton.

When word reached Alf Lennon – always one to turn up like a bad penny, as the Stanleys would put it – the generally absent father invited John to spend some time with him at the seaside. Julia tracked the pair down to a boarding house in Blackpool. ‘She’d now got a nice little home and decided she wanted him,’³ Alf later recalled. Alf planned to take John with him to New Zealand and, he claimed, asked Julia to accompany them. She refused. They turned to John and asked him to choose. The boy was faced with a grave choice, the outcome of which would inevitably alter the course of his life: New Zealand with his father, or back to Liverpool with Julia. Initially, it looked as if Alf’s gamble had paid off. Without a moment’s hesitation, according to Alf, John turned to his father. Julia asked him once more and again he replied, ‘Daddy’. However when Julia rose to leave, dabbing her eyes, John ran to her. Easily resigned to the situation, Alf Lennon wouldn’t see his son again until the whole world knew his name.

John returned to Mendips and life with Aunt Mimi, now more determined than ever to ensure her young nephew was raised in a secure environment. He was encouraged by Mimi to read classics such as Just William, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows. They sparked his imagination and John soon began scribbling verse and stories in his own notebooks, as well as compiling scrapbooks of cartoons and cuttings from magazines.

From 1951, increasingly he would spend time at the house his mother now shared with Bobby Dykins, a couple of miles across town. Julia loved spurring on her son’s artistic endeavours and introduced him to a world of music unheard in Mimi’s strait-laced household. They would jive around the lounge to Elvis Presley hits and it was Julia who later purchased John’s first Teddy Boy clothes: a coloured shirt, drainpipe jeans and coat. These were carefree days for Lennon, punctuated only by the unexpected death of Mimi’s husband George in 1955. John was devastated at the loss of his father figure.

At Quarry Bank High School, Lennon’s approach to learning was characterised by a rebellious spirit. His 1956 school report was littered with ‘could do better’ and ‘lacks effort’. ‘He has many of the wrong ambitions and his energy is too often misplaced’,⁴ concluded his head teacher. Chief amongst his distractions was the latest youth craze to sweep the country: skiffle, which involved strumming acoustic guitars and plucking tea-chest basses to the percussive rhythm of scraped washboards. It was Britain’s first do-it-yourself music; the only real instrument you needed was a guitar. Lennon ordered an acoustic model by mail order and Julia allowed it to be delivered to her address, rather than to his disapproving Aunt Mimi.

Ownership of a guitar was something of a coup for the ambitiously hip Lennon and in the late summer of 1956, he formed his own skiffle band, the Quarrymen, the name derived from a line in the Quarry Bank School song. The group’s repertoire comprised versions of songs made famous by Lonnie Donegan, Lead Belly, Hank Williams and other musical heroes. They landed their first gig in autumn 1956 at the local church hall, and more soon followed.

By the end of his last year at high school John had converted the Quarrymen from an accomplished but run-of-the-mill skiffle outfit into a would-be rock ’n’ roll band. This was inspired in part by a trip to the cinema. The Girl Can’t Help It was the influential movie of the day, starring Jayne Mansfield and showcasing the ‘teen’ sound of Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and others. Its screening at the city’s Scala Cinema in the summer of 1957 marked a pivotal moment in the development of Liverpool’s musical youth. Lennon had heard the future.

Another cinema-goer who loved rock ’n’ roll, and had even learned to play some of the songs by listening to Radio Luxembourg’s evening broadcasts and patiently working out the chords, was a lad from neighbouring Allerton: Paul McCartney.

2

‘When You’re Crippled Inside’ – Quarryman

That’s the music that brought me from the provinces of England to the world … I don’t know where we’d have been without rock ’n’ roll and I really love it.

John Lennon

(Beatles Anthology, p.11)

Newspapers on the morning of Saturday, 6 July 1957 bore headlines about American nuclear testing, Australian spin bowlers and Commonwealth summits. Rather prophetically, perhaps, The Times also reported that day on an infestation of beetles discovered in a cargo of Spanish onions unloaded at Liverpool docks.

On a day that would change their lives forever, two Liverpool teenagers were heading for Woolton’s annual ‘village’ fete at St Peter’s church. At Mendips, 16-year-old John was greasing back his hair and choosing his clothes carefully: black drainpipe jeans, check shirt. The heavy horn-rimmed glasses he usually wore to correct his poor eyesight would have to be left behind. This was a big day: the Quarrymen had a gig. They’d be riding to the fete on the back of one of the processional trucks, then playing at the event itself. Aunt Mimi, unaware that her nephew was even in a band, would be there.

Elsewhere, Paul McCartney, two weeks over the age of 15, was twanging on his Zenith guitar at the house he shared with his father and young brother. Music filled the McCartney household: his father Jim once led his own group, Jim Mac’s Jazz Band, and pre-war American ballads and jazz numbers were as familiar as nursery rhymes to the young Paul. But it was the raw power of rock ’n’ roll which now captivated the schoolboy’s attention. In 1956 he had seen Lonnie Donegan at the Liverpool Empire and by the following year was proficient enough to work out the chords to several of his heroes’ hits. Amongst his idols was Eddie Cochran.

Paul’s school friend Ivan Vaughan had a garden which backed onto Mendips and Vaughan – ‘Ivy’ to Lennon and his friends – was one of the Woolton gang. He was well aware of both John’s and Paul’s interest in rock ’n’ roll and suggested Paul come along to the fete to see the Quarrymen and maybe meet some girls. Paul knew John by sight but the two had never spoken. After struggling to stay upright on the float as it swayed through Woolton, the Quarrymen – John Lennon (vocals, guitar), Eric Griffiths (guitar), Colin Hanton (drums), Rod Davis (banjo), Pete Shotton (washboard) and Len Garry (tea-chest bass) – reached St Peter’s for their late afternoon performance, on a makeshift stage behind the church.

When Paul and Ivan arrived, the band were running through a version of the Del-Vikings’ hit ‘Come Go With Me’. John was singing the wrong words, Paul noticed. ‘He was filling in with blues lines,’ recalled McCartney. ‘I thought that was good and he was singing well … I quite liked them.’⁵ Other cover versions the Quarrymen performed that sun-dappled afternoon included Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Puttin’ on the Style’, Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’.

The Quarrymen finished and made their way over to the church hall to set up for an evening session that would effectively close the fete. Paul and Ivy followed, and in the hall Vaughan introduced him to John. This was the meeting that changed the future of popular music.

Paul, eighteen months John’s junior, showed Lennon how to tune his guitar properly and used it to sing Cochran’s ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ and a Little Richard medley. He then pounded out a version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘A Whole Lot of Shakin’ on the backstage piano. Whether or not it was thought of at the time as an audition, his obvious musicianship for one so young made him irresistible to John. Paul was invited to become a Quarryman in October 1957.

Lennon, meanwhile, was reaching the end of his schooling at Quarry Bank. Although obviously an intelligent pupil, the schoolwork foisted on him throughout his years of formal education held little interest for him, beyond the art classes. And so, eager to encourage what he did best, Mimi enrolled John at Liverpool College of Art. He started there in the autumn of 1957, as did another young student called Cynthia Powell. The previous year another, even more talented, painter named Stuart Sutcliffe had also joined the art school. Both would soon catch the eye of the adolescent Lennon.

His life revolved around music and art, with a continued interest in reading and writing. Some potential as a caricaturist and humourist was identified by his tutors. John began exploring his new world in student bedsits, smoke-filled bars and small, sweat-drizzled clubs like the Cavern on Matthew Street. Sutcliffe, with his film-star good looks and genuine artistic talent, became a soul mate – perhaps Lennon’s first.

But, as Lennon swaggered towards adulthood, tragedy struck on 15 July 1958. On that day Julia visited her son at Mendips. As she hurried across Menlove Avenue for her evening bus, she was fatally struck by a car driven by an off-duty policeman, Eric Clague. Interviewed in the seventies, Lennon claimed that Clague was drunk at the wheel. Clague maintained that Julia had stepped into the road without looking and the collision was unavoidable.

The impact of Julia’s death on the family was immense. On John, in particular, it was immeasurable. The 17-year-old endured her funeral with his head on Mimi’s lap. He would spend the following two decades trying to come to terms with her death, his confusion, anger and grief spilling over into song, from ‘Help!’ (1964), to ‘Julia’ (1968) and ‘Mother’ (1970). He lost her twice, he later said; first when she willingly abandoned him to be raised by Mimi, and again when she was killed.

However, another female was soon there to fill the void. Already a precocious womaniser, John had allegedly lost his virginity with a strawberry-blonde, Barbara Baker, and notched up several conquests since, chiefly amongst the Quarrymen’s willing ‘groupies’. Nineteen-year-old Cynthia Powell was different. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction – A Giant of Popular Music
• 1 ‘Who am I Supposed to Be?’ – Childhood
• 2 ‘When You’re Crippled Inside’ – Quarryman
• 3 ‘Oh Yeah, I’ll Tell You Something’ – From the Cavern to the World
• 4 ‘Above Us Only Sky’ – Beatle
• 5 ‘Christ, You Know it Ain’t Easy’ – Acid, Apple and Yoko
• 6 ‘Now I’m John’ – Plastic Ono Band
• 7 ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ – Lost Weekends
• 8 ‘Strange Days Indeed’ – House Husband
• 9 ‘Through a Glass Onion’ – Legacy
• Notes
• Timeline
• Web Links
• Further Reading and Viewing