The cynical idealist, p.3
The Cynical Idealist, page 3
The problem was not with his initiative or intelligence. His Aunt Mimi owned a twenty-volume set of the world’s best short stories, and by the time Lennon was ten he had read and reread most of them, being particularly enthralled by Balzac. At twelve he ploughed through her encyclopedia. By sixteen he had read the complete works of Winston Churchill. He also enjoyed Edgar Allan Poe, James Thurber, Edward Lear, and Richmal Crompton, and his favorite books were Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass.7
He had a precocious mind, and he was well aware of it. In a 1970 interview, he was asked:
Do you think you’re a genius?
Yes. If there’s such a thing as one, I am one.
When did you first realize it?
When I was about twelve. I used to think, I must be a genius, but nobody’s noticed [laugh]. Either I’m a genius or I’m mad, which is it? “No,” I said, “I can’t be mad because nobody’s put me away; therefore, I’m a genius.”8
Lennon’s academic problem was with academia itself. He felt stifled by the regimentation. He resented the assumptions that were inherent in the educational system—that those in charge had a right to direct his life, to tell him where to go and when to be there, to judge his work and his behavior by their own standards, and to expect him to study and master information they considered important.
So he rebelled against their authority. He played pranks to throw the system off balance. He would carry an alarm clock in his satchel, set to go off during the class, or rig the blackboard to come crashing down as soon as the teacher put chalk to it.9 The class would erupt in laughter and be unmanageable for minutes, and Lennon would revel in the disorder. The resulting detentions were considered a small price to pay for the satisfaction of rebellion, and they lost their effectiveness as a corrective when repeated several days a week.
Inevitably, he and his closest comrade, Peter Shotton, went too far one day and earned the dreaded caning by Headmaster Taylor. Even then, Lennon subverted the intent by capitalizing on an opportunity for humor. Between the headmaster’s office and the hallway lay a vestibule. Passing through the vestibule on the way out to Shotton, who was still waiting for his turn, John dropped to his hands and knees and came crawling out the door, whimpering as though beaten into submission. Shotton was immediately petrified with fear, his imagination racing with what torture might be awaiting him inside. Then he noticed Lennon grinning at his reaction and erupted into an uncontrollable fit of giggling just as he was called in for his turn under the cane. Incensed at Shotton’s lighthearted attitude about his punishment, Headmaster Taylor gave him the thrashing of his life.10
It was the first of many canings for the two boys, and eventually that method’s lack of effectiveness drove the subsequent headmaster to inflict a punishment totally without precedent at Quarry Bank—ejection from school, which lasted for a week.
Lennon seemed congenitally incapable of conforming or reforming. The most obvious destination for a teenager with such a bitter heart and rebellious disposition was a sociopathic adulthood, and he might have ended there if he had not possessed a way to give vent to his frustration and yet maintain—at least in his mind and in the minds of those in his circle—a sense of parity. Lennon was not only extremely intelligent; he was also highly creative, and it provided him a way to cope.
While his instructors stood at the front of the room lecturing, he would sit at his desk scribbling, ostensibly taking notes. Actually, he was drawing caricatures of the teachers and writing poems and parodies of what was happening at school, creating works that were usually derogatory, often obscene, and frequently emphasized physical deformities. He would slip them to his classmates surreptitiously, evoking smothered laughter.
His output was so well received that he began to compile it in a special workbook he called The Daily Howl, which he added to each evening.11Each morning an eager audience would await the latest installment. The tome grew so popular that he was forced to draw up a waiting list of readers. According to Pete Shotton, the work had much the same flavor as In His Own Write, published in 1964. Reading the galleys for Lennon’s first book of poetry, prose, and art, Shotton recognized some of the writing and cartoons from the days at Quarry Bank.
Lennon’s poor grades at Quarry Bank made it pointless to try to enroll at any university, but another avenue was open. Everyone agreed that his drawings showed originality, and he applied to Liverpool College of Art and was accepted.
He started classes there in September 1957. He found a freer environment, with no dress code, and the agreeable requirement to make drawings of nude models. Yet the instructors were there to impart their own methods and expected their pupils to apply themselves to mastering them. Lennon, chafing under any constraints, soon resorted to his old tendency toward nonconformity. In one of his more memorable exploits, he worked diligently through a session as one of a class of fifteen students while the unclothed model held her pose. When the time came to hand in his effort to the teacher, Lennon’s drawing depicted the one item she had been wearing—a wristwatch.12
The classmate with whom Lennon developed the closest relationship while in college was Stuart Sutcliffe, according to Mimi “the only real friend John ever had.”13 In some ways he was Lennon’s antithesis—quiet, intense, diligent in his studies. But he was an uncommonly talented artist, and Lennon knew it; Sutcliffe was one of the few people whose opinion he took seriously. They became best friends and eventually roommates. When apart from each other, they would exchange letters that sometimes ran to twenty pages.
They had far-ranging discussions about art. Sutcliffe was obsessive about the subject, and he prodded Lennon to move beyond the cartoon-like drawings he usually produced and experiment with more serious works of oil on canvas. John responded by creating paintings described by another student as “wild and aggressive.”14 They tended to be set in darkly lit nightclubs and invariably included musicians and a blonde at the bar who resembled Lennon’s dream woman, Brigitte Bardot.
Art held a fascination for Lennon, but the passion art inspired in Sutcliffe John felt for a radically different form of self-expression, one still in its infancy—rock ’n’ roll. This new form of music appealed to his youthful vitality and his sexual energy, but most especially to his rebellious attitude toward tradition and authority. It had no respect whatsoever for tradition, and it strode right up to authority and punched it in the face.
Lennon first became conscious of the rock ’n’ roll sound in 1956 while tuning in the faint signal of Radio Luxembourg, a pirate radio station broadcasting from the continent.15 His initiation was “Rock Around the Clock,” a record first released in 1954, then resurrected a year later as the title music for the film Blackboard Jungle. He loved the driving rhythm that was so far removed from the bland, syrupy music the BBC seemed to prefer.
He kept listening to Radio Luxembourg and one day heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” performed by some boy with the exotic name of Elvis from the exotic territory of Tennessee. “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Hound Dog” followed, then a fusillade of pulse-lifting songs from other performers such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, and Buddy Holly. The music hit Lennon like a revelation, lifting his spirit at the same time it antagonized those in authority. The more the establishment disparaged Elvis Presley and the decadent form of music he championed, the more Lennon took them into his heart.
Britain had its own new music, skiffle, which energized American and British folk songs by applying to them faster tempos and harder rhythms. Skiffle’s advantage lay in its simplicity and lack of polish. No need for lengthy musical training and a stage filled with expensive equipment; by learning three or four chords on a guitar or banjo and setting up a rudimentary rhythm on a hand-strummed washboard and a tea-chest bass, a group of aspiring musicians could start entertaining.
Lennon pestered Mimi until she took him to a music shop in central Liverpool and bought a steel-string guitar for seventeen pounds. In March 1957, he and a group of friends started a band. They practiced in Julia Lennon’s bathroom or in an air-raid shelter in Pete Shotton’s backyard—both favored for their acoustics. Their first public performance came on June 9, at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool.16
They initially called themselves the Blackjacks, but John quickly changed the name to the Quarrymen.17 The reference to the school he was about to leave might have been sarcastic, or possibly even sentimental, but given his gift for wordplay it was just as likely a clever allusion to “digging rock.” Soon after the group was formed, its repertory began to drift away from folk music toward rock ’n’ roll. The driving force for this change was, of course, Lennon, who served as the group’s lead singer and chief architect.
Still just sixteen, John Lennon was taking the first steps to find his own way—to decouple from the system whose aim was to channel him into a productive life. As of yet, he could not have understood it that way. His actions were merely intuitive rebelliousness—a combination of his own high intelligence, the self-assertiveness instilled by his unconventional family life, and his antagonistic feelings toward the traditions and discipline of the British educational system. Even so, though his group was simply an ad hoc assemblage of friends with washboards, tea chests, and banjos, he was striking off in a direction of his own choosing, the self-created leader of a group performing the type of music he most enjoyed.
He was groping to define himself.
On July 6, 1957, the Quarrymen played an engagement at the garden fete at St. Peter’s Church, not far from Mimi’s house. A friend of Lennon’s, Ivan Vaughan, came to the event and invited a friend of his own named Paul McCartney. Between shows, Vaughan introduced them. Paul had brought along his guitar, and to establish his credibility he proceeded to play a song for John and his band. John marveled at Paul’s musicianship—he was so impressed, in fact, that he overcame his fear of being outshone and later dispatched Pete Shotton to invite Paul to join the group.18
When the new school year began—Lennon at Liverpool College of Art and McCartney at the adjacent Liverpool Institute—the two began to meet during lunch breaks and after classes, practicing their instruments, working out the chords to the songs they liked, and attempting to write songs of their own. McCartney soon introduced Lennon to a schoolmate, George Harrison. In February 1958, he became a fixture in the band. The three of them met each day for lunch at the college canteen or in the classroom of Arthur Ballard, the one teacher who saw past Lennon’s disruptive behavior and had an intuition of his potential.19
For two years the group struggled to keep together, to find local engagements, to pass auditions. Lennon kept up the pretense of being an art student, but his heart was in the band. He had little encouragement, other than the satisfaction of performing, but he continued to sense the possibility of avoiding the straitjacket toward which Mimi and the college and society were guiding him. To assure himself of independence, to avoid having to conform to the rules of others, to do something he loved instead of what was expected of him, he knew he had to succeed as a performer of the music the establishment despised.
3
HELP!
Lennon’s friendship with Stuart Sutcliffe yielded unexpected benefits. Sutcliffe joined the Quarrymen at John’s insistence, though he had no musical ability, using the proceeds from the sale of a painting to purchase a bass guitar. A friend of Sutcliffe’s, Allan Williams, owned a small basement club, the Jacaranda. Williams allowed Sutcliffe’s band to audition for the club and started to give them occasional bookings.1
The Quarrymen discussed changing the group’s name to something more consistent with the leading popular bands, and Sutcliffe lofted the name Beetles—a nod to Buddy Holly’s backing group, the Crickets.2 Lennon, the wordsmith, decided that it should be spelled with an a, alluding to the driving beat of their music as well as to the Beat poets—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti—whose charisma and antiestablishment attitude fascinated him.
In May 1960, Allan Williams booked the boys on their first tour, which gave the band its first glimmer of success. They traveled through Scotland as the backup group for a local singer. Later that same summer, Williams was also responsible for the booking that proved pivotal to their development—Hamburg, Germany.3
Situated in the city’s red-light district, the Indra and Kaiserkeller clubs attracted a mélange of dockworkers, gangsters, middle-class men seeking a respite from their wives, and university-age boys and girls with bohemian inclinations. The atmosphere was raucous, combustible, oft en menacing. Confrontations were frequent, fights regular, and the waiters, who doubled as bouncers, all carried truncheons and pistols that ejected small clouds of tear gas.4 Customer tables crowded the stages, and entertainers came within easy reach of heckling, drunken patrons. Those who survived were the ones who learned to show no fear, and those who succeeded learned to project boundless self-confidence—even to be confrontational with the audience.
Lennon flourished in the chaos. “I grew up in Hamburg, not Liverpool,” he asserted.5 Up to the time he left Liverpool College of Art in July 1960, his approach to life had been one of simple rejection—of the system itself, of the authorities responsible for making him conform to the system, and of the processed information he was expected to assimilate. In Hamburg, he suddenly found himself with nothing to reject and license to be free. Nothing was expected of him other than to perform the music he loved.
“To do is to be,” Sartre asserted. In the dark, turbulent world of the Indra and the Kaiserkeller, Lennon began constructing his adult persona on the irreverent personality he had formed as an adolescent.
The owner of the clubs gave him free rein, knowing that the patrons drank more when entertained by a flamboyant show. Lennon refused to defer to them, responding to their rowdy taunts with a “Seig Heil!” and a Nazi salute.6 He honed his sarcastic humor (“Where’s your tank?”), which he shouted out in English amid the din so the listeners usually did not realize they were being skewered.7 He played the fool himself, coming on stage in his underwear and sporting a toilet seat around his neck. He drank during numbers, smoked, ate, threw food, and stopped dead in the middle of a song when he lost interest.
He began defining himself as a creative entity, too, maturing as singer, performer, and songwriter. Playing from six to eight exhausting hours a night with his group, he learned how to catch the attention of a chaotic crowd, to create rhythms that could not be ignored, melodies that echoed in the brain.
Lennon also encountered the “street” version of existentialism. Its most famous proponent, Jean-Paul Sartre, had been lionized by continental intellectuals ever since World War II. University professors debated his philosophy and disseminated it through their students. While many students no doubt struggled to grasp its nuances, they were disillusioned with the political and economic ideologies that had come to dominate society and embraced the philosophy’s underlying call to define themselves.
Among his college friends back in Liverpool, Lennon had spent many lively hours after classes discussing the Beat Generation and its motivations.8 Now, when he struck up friendships with some of the younger visitors to the Kaiserkeller, he found that they, like him, felt alienated within their own culture. They were art students from Hamburg’s Meister Schule, a group that deliberately turned its back on established values, generated its own rules for behavior, and held its own view of art, music, and fashion. Lennon quickly dubbed the group “the exis.” Klaus Voormann first came in, alone, after a clash with his girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr. He enjoyed the Beatles’ performance so much that three days later he brought her to the club to see them. Within two months, Astrid and Stuart Sutcliffe had become engaged. Lennon became good friends with Astrid and her circle and often visited her home, gravitating to her bookcase and expressing such interest in certain volumes that she would purchase English-language editions for him.9
The Beatles’ first visit to Hamburg lasted scarcely more than one hundred days, but it fundamentally altered Lennon. From his letters back home to his girlfriend, Cynthia Powell, she could clearly see that while his drive to succeed remained red hot, the frustration and anger she had witnessed in Liverpool was noticeably reduced.10
The experience came to a premature end when the owner of a more prestigious club, the Top Ten, offered the Beatles more money and better accommodations. They broke their contract with the owner of the Kaiserkeller, Bruno Koschmider, and he determined to get even. He notified the police that George Harrison, not yet eighteen years old, was working illegally in the country, and he was summarily deported back to Britain. Koschmider also charged McCartney and the group’s drummer, Pete Best, with starting a fire in the lodgings he provided them, and they too were forced to leave after spending several hours in jail.11 With the band broken apart and no money put away, Lennon reluctantly followed the others home to Liverpool in December 1960.
After a few morose weeks, he summoned up the spirit to renew the uphill battle. Pete Best arranged for them to play at the Casbah, a basement club owned by his mother.12 They also had several engagements at Litherland Town Hall, where the fans who remembered the group from before Hamburg were amazed at the transformation. But the real coup came in the spring of 1961, when the group managed to get booked into a dank cellar in the heart of the business district of Liverpool.
The place was called the Cavern. Secretaries and sales clerks liked to gather there at midday for a quick lunch and the chance to listen to live jazz music until it was time to get back to work. Now, to a startled crowd of white-collar workers hoping merely for a respite from their humdrum jobs, the Beatles suddenly brought the high-voltage energy of a late-night set of rock ’n’ roll in Hamburg.13
