John Lennon: The Life. Philip Norman

to be met by John) increased to £30 9s.

      John, Paul and George played at the Casbah for seven successive Saturday nights, still billed as the Quarrymen and augmented by a fourth guitarist named Ken Brown, a member of the disbanded Les Stewart Quartet. The club proved an instant hit, attracting such crowds that Mrs Best had to hire a doorman to back up her own formidable presence behind the snack and soft drinks bar. West Derby’s weekly paper did a story headlined ‘Kasbah [sic] Has New Meaning for Local Teenagers’, accompanied by the first-ever press picture of John in performance with the new Club 40, supporting its cutaway body on one white-trousered knee and clearly glorying in his power to reach the topmost notes on the fretboard.

      Among the Saturday-night regulars was Dorothy (Dot) Rhone, a petite 16-year-old from Childwall, whom John took to calling Bubbles, even though her hair didn’t have so much as a ringlet. Dot was drawn to his ’rugged’ looks the moment she set eyes on him but, learning that he already had a steady girlfriend, agreed to go out with Paul McCartney instead. Despite her extraordinary cuteness, she was even milder than Cynthia Powell and submitted without protest to the same rules from Paul that John imposed on Cyn—total adoration, fidelity, availability and revising her appearance and wardrobe to look as much as possible like Brigitte Bardot. ‘Paul was always supposed to be the charming one, but John was more compassionate,’ she remembers. ‘When Paul and I had a row, he’d often tell Paul to be nicer to me.’

      In Mona Best’s happy combination of club and Enid Blytonish secret den, the Quarrymen seemed to have found an ideal home. Mrs Best made them part of her family circle, frequently inviting them upstairs for cups of tea or meals in the rambling house, which was crammed with exotic mementos of her Indian upbringing. They grew particularly friendly with her younger son, Peter, a strikingly handsome 18-year-old whose reserved manner and crisply styled hair earned him frequent comparison with the film star Jeff Chandler.

      Then, on the Saturday night of 10 October, everything suddenly turned sour. Ken Brown, the new fourth Quarryman, reported for duty with a bad cold. In her matriarchal fashion, Mrs Best decided he wasn’t well enough to play and sent him upstairs to sit in the warm with her elderly mother. At the evening’s end, however, she still gave him his quarter share of the Quarrymen’s £3 fee. John, Paul and George protested that, as Brown hadn’t performed, he shouldn’t be paid; when Mrs. Best stood firm, the three of them walked out in a huff.

      However John might blag about the rhythm being ‘in the guitars’, it was clear that if his group was to go on playing anywhere outside the art college’s basement, they had to find a drummer to replace Colin Hanton. But the task seemed a hopeless one. All the good players around were already comfortably ensconced in prestigious groups like Cass and the Cassanovas or Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, where their personalities as well as percussive showmanship often proved as great a draw as the singers. The Cassanovas had upholsterer John Hutchinson, aka Johnny Hutch, a famous tough guy known to hit equally hard whether the skin in question covered drum or human jaw. The Hurricanes had Ritchie Starkey, a sad-eyed boy from the tougher-than-tough Dingle area whose love of flashy finger ornamentation had led him to adopt the stage name Ringo Starr.

      Musical nobodies John, Paul and George might be, yet they still had the chutzpah to enter their names against the cream of Liverpool’s drummer-enhanced groups when heats for another Carroll Levis ‘Nationwide Search for a Star’ competition was held at the Liverpool Empire. To camouflage the drummer problem, they appeared as a vocal trio with John in the centre, minus guitar, resting one hand on Paul’s shoulder and one on George’s. It was an effective and rather daring idea, since Paul’s and George’s left-and right-handed guitar necks pointed neatly in opposite directions, and physical contact between young males, onstage or off, was still taboo.

      The need to pull out something special for Carroll Levis also finally extinguished that tired old skiffle handle, the Quarrymen. For days beforehand, John and Paul racked their brains for a new name with an American lilt that hadn’t already been taken by some other group, national or local. Their final choice was a nod to a currently successful US instrumental act, Johnny and the Hurricanes, and also to rock ‘n’ roll’s founding father, Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed. When they took the stage for their first heat at the Empire, it was as Johnny and the Moondogs.

      They performed two Buddy Holly songs, ‘Think It Over’ and ‘Rave On’, with enough panache to reach the area semi-finals at the Hippodrome theatre in Manchester on Sunday, 15 November. As with John’s previous Carroll Levis experience, the winners were decided in an end-of-show finale, when the applause for each contestant was measured on Levis’s Clapometer. Unluckily, however, this climax came at a much later hour in Manchester than it had in Liverpool. Too poor to afford an overnight hotel stay, Johnny and the Moondogs had to leave before the finale to catch their last bus and train home. All three of them felt bitterly disappointed and cheated, though only John actively expressed his resentment of the competitors who were able to stay. ‘That night,’ Paul remembers, ’someone [in a rival group] was relieved of his guitar.’

      With no drummer in prospect, an easier and slightly cheaper way of strengthening the beat was to add one of the electric bass guitars now in general use around Merseyside bandstands. The electric bass with its fretted neck being relatively easy to play, John did not have to break in another outsider, but could simply invite one of his art college friends to make up a fourth with Paul, George and him. During another late-night jam session at 9 Percy Street, he threw the bass player’s job open to both Stu Sutcliffe and Rod Murray—whichever was first to get hold of the requisite instrument. Rod set to work to build his own, using equipment in the college woodworking department to cut out its body and neck. He was just pondering how to electrify and string it when he found he’d been beaten to the post.

      Every two years, the Littlewoods football-pool magnate John Moores sponsored an exhibition at Liverpool’s illustrious Walker Art Gallery to which local painters and sculptors were invited to submit works. For the John Moores show of November 1959, Stu intended to offer one of his outsized abstracts, consisting of two 8-by-4-foot panels. With Rod Murray’s help, he took the first of the finished canvases to the exhibits’ assembly point, then got sidetracked by John and the others at Ye Cracke, and somehow never got around to delivering the second panel. Unaware that they were looking at only half the intended picture, the judges included it among only a handful of local entries to hang at the Walker. So enamoured of Stu’s technique was the great John Moores that he bought the single panel for an impressive £65.

      The windfall allowed Stu to splash out on an impressive Hofner President bass guitar and step into the vacancy in John’s group. John reassured him that he’d soon pick up bass playing, since it didn’t involve learning ‘chords and stuff’, just simple, repetitive patterns over four strings rather than six. A friendly bassist with a rival group, Dave May of the Silhouettes, agreed to coach him in the rudiments.

      His college tutors, and several of his friends, felt that Stu was making a disastrous wrong turn. No one could have been a stronger supporter of John’s music than Bill Harry—as he would one day prove in spades. Yet he felt mystified, and rather let down, that someone at such exalted level in the visual medium should wish to start at the very bottom of rock ‘n’ roll. ‘The image was what appealed to Stuart more than the music,’ Harry says. ‘He loved the romance of it. And the fact that John wanted him in the group. He just couldn’t say no to John.’

       9 UNDER THE JACARANDA

      I was never—repeat NEVER—known as Johnny Silver.

      Just before Christmas, Mrs Plant, the long-suffering owner of 9 Percy Street, had paid her property a surprise visit and been horrified by what she’d found. A cache of antique furniture awaiting renovation in the basement had been chopped up and used as firewood to warm the ex-Quarrymen’s practice sessions and John’s illicit nights with Cynthia. The Adam fireplace in Stu Sutcliffe’s studio had been torn out to create a contemporary openhearth effect, and had since disappeared. (‘We left bits of it all over town,’ Rod Murray admits. ‘Like getting rid of a dead body…’)