Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation - Softcover

Norman, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684830671 ISBN 13: 9780684830674

Publisher: Fireside, 1996

Synopsis

THE CLASSIC CHRONICLE OF THE BEATLES -- THEIR MUSIC, THEIR LIVES, THEIR TIMES

From their primitive first chords to the huge success of the Beatles Anthology, the Beatles have been an integral part of our culture and our consciousness for over thirty-five years. Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation tells the extraordinary story of the rise of four scruffy boys from Liverpool to beings more adored, more influential -- and in many ways more troubled --than any in the history of popular entertainment. It is also a penetrating social history of our time, based on an incredible wealth of material -- eyewitness accounts, interviews, stories withheld from the press and public -- that was available exclusively to the author.

Rich in detail, anecdotes, and background, with 100 stunning photographs, Shout! takes us from the wild, often comical days at the beginning in Liverpool to the life and death of Stu Sutcliffe, the brilliant boy known as the "fifth Beatle"; from the psychedelic triumph of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to the band's embrace of Indian music and spirituality; from the brilliantly unified sounds of Abbey Road to Paul's desperate attempts to form a final comeback concert.

Riveting, Enlightening, Heartbreaking, Shout! Is A True Epic.

About this title

About the Author:

Philip Norman is a journalist and a novelist who in 1968 was assigned to cover the Beatles' own business utopia, Apple Corps, from the inside. He is the author of Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly and many other books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

October 1940

"He was the one I'd waited for."

John Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, during one of the fiercest night raids by Hitler's Luftwaffe on Liverpool. All summer, after tea, people would switch on their wireless sets at low volume, listening not to the muted dance music but to the sky outside their open back doors. When the music cut off, before the first siren went, you knew that the bombers were returning.

Liverpool paid a heavy price for its Naval shipyards, and for the miles of docks where convoys stood making ready to brave the North Atlantic. The city was Britain's last loophole for overseas food supplies. Night after night, with geometric accuracy, explosions tore along the seaming of wharves and warehouses and black castle walls, and over the tramlines into streets of friendly red back-to-back houses, of pubs and missions and corner dairies with cowsheds behind. During the worst week, so many ships lay sunk along the Mersey, there was not a single berth free for incoming cargo. But on Lime Street, the Empire Theatre carried on performances as usual. Sometimes the whole audience would crowd out into the foyer to look across the black acropolis of St. George's Hall, to a sky flashing white, then dark again as more bombs pummeled the port and the river.

Mimi Stanley had always worried about her younger sister, Julia. She worried about her, especially tonight, with Liverpool aflame and Julia in labor at the Oxford Street maternity home. When news of the baby came by telephone, Mimi set out on foot from the Stanley house on Newcastle Road. "I ran two miles. I couldn't stop thinking, 'It's a boy, it's a boy. He's the one I've waited for.'"

She held John in her arms twenty minutes after he was born. His second name, Julia said -- in honor of Great Britain's guardian -- would be Winston. Just then a landmine fell directly outside the hospital. "But my sister stayed in bed," Mimi says, "and they put the baby under the bed. They wanted me to go into the basement but I wouldn't. I ran all the way back to Newcastle Road to tell Father the news. 'Get under shelter,' the wardens were shouting. 'Oh, be quiet,' I told them. Father was there, and I said, 'It's a boy and he's beautiful, he's the best one of all.' Father looked up and said, 'Oh, beck, he would be.'"

Mimi's and Julia's father was an official with the Glasgow and Liverpool Salvage Company. He was aboard the salvage tug which tried to raise the submarine Thetis from her deathbed in Liverpool Bay. He had five daughters and brought them up strictly, though he was often away from home salvaging ships. "We loved Father," Mimi says, "but we liked it when he went away to sea and we girls could kick over the traces a bit. If ever there was a boy I had my eye on, I used to pray at night, 'Please, God, let no one be hurt but let there be a wreck.'"

Mimi was slender, brisk and dark, with fine cheekbones like a Cherokee. Julia was slim, auburn-haired, more conventionally pretty. Both loved laughter, but Mimi insisted there should be sense in it. "Oh, Julia," she would endlessly plead, "be serious." Julia could never be serious about anything.

Her marriage to Freddy Lennon in 1938 had been the least serious act of her life. She met Freddy one day in Sefton Park, and commented on the silly hat he wore. To please her, Freddy sent it skimming into the lake. She started bringing him home, to her whole family's great dismay. He was only a ship's waiter, erratically employed: he preferred, in the nautical term for malingering, to "swallow the anchor." Julia married him on an impulse at the Mount Pleasant Register Office, putting down her occupation as "cinema usherette" because she knew how it would annoy her father. "I'll never forget that day," Mimi says. "Julia came home, threw a piece of paper on the table and said, 'There, that's it. I've married him.'"

When war broke out in 1939, Freddy was aboard a passenger liner berthed in New York. The next Julia heard, he had been locked away with the internees on Ellis Island. He came home briefly in 1940, then sailed away again, this time for good. The shipping line felt obliged to terminate the wages they had been paying direct to Julia.

All her four sisters took a hand in caring for the new baby. But one sister cared specially -- the one who, having no babies of her own, ran through the air raid to hold him. From the moment John could talk, he would say, "Where's Mimi? Where's Mimi's house?"

"Julia had met someone else, with whom she had a chance of happiness," Mimi says. "And no man wants another man's child. That's when I said I wanted to bring John to Menlove Avenue to live with George and me. I wouldn't even let him risk being hurt or feeling he was in the way. I made up my mind that I'd be the one to give him what every child has the right to -- a safe and happy home life."

The fires ceased falling on Liverpool. The city, though cratered like a Roman ruin, returned to its old majestically confident commercial life. St. George's Hall, badly scarred, still stood within its columns, between equestrian statues of Victoria and Albert. Along the docks, the overhead railway remained intact, passing above the funnels and warehouses and branching masts, the horse-drawn wagons and clanking, shuffling "Green Goddess" Liverpool trams. Business resumed in the streets lined by statues and colonnades and Moorish arches and huge public clocks. At the Pier Head, that broad river front, congregations of trams drew up between the Mersey and its three gray, soaring waterside temples: to the Cunard Company, the Docks and Harbour Board and the Royal Liver Insurance Company. The "Liver Building" was still there, its twin belfries, higher than the seagulls, crowned with two silhouettes which every Liverpool child learns to look for -- the skittish, somehow volatile and questing "Liver birds."

Liverpool was still business and banking and insurance, and ships. From the southern headland, under rings of tall cranes, came the rhythmic clout of Cammell Laird's yard, where they built the Alabama, the Mauretania, the Ark Royal, the Thetis. Across from Birkenhead, brisk river ferries crossed the path of ocean liners, warships, merchantmen and the smaller fry of what was still Europe's busiest shipping pool. Ever and again, from a slipway on the broad river bend, some fresh ungarnished hull would slide backward, and ride there, free of dragchains, while tug whoops mingled with cheers from the bank.

Liverpool was docks and ships and as such indistinguishable in Britain's northern industrial fogs but for one additional, intermittent product. Liverpool was where music hall comedians, like Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey and Robb Wilton, came from. Some elixir in a population mixed from Welsh and Irish, and also East Indian and Chinese, and uttered in the strange glottal dialect that simultaneously seems to raise derisive eyebrows, had always possessed the power to make the rest of the country laugh.

Liverpool "comics" were always preferred by the London theatrical agents. But there was a proviso. It was better for them to lose their Liverpool accent, and omit all references to the city of their origin. No one in London cared about a place so far to the northwest, so gray and sooty and old-fashioned and, above all, so utterly without glamour as Liverpool.

Woolton, where John grew up, is a suburb three miles to the northeast, but further in spirit, from the Liverpool of docks and Chinatown and pub signs pasted around every street corner. From Lime Street, you drive uphill, past the grand old Adelphi Hotel, past the smaller backstreet hotels with no pretense at grandeur, past the Baptist temples and Irish meeting halls, and grassed-over bomb sites, turned into eternal temporary carparks, lapping against some isolated little waterworks or church. Eventually you come to a traffic roundabout known by the name of its smallest tributary, Penny Lane. Woolton lies beyond, in wide dual carriageways with grass verges, and mock Tudor villas whose gardens adjoin parks, country clubs and golf courses.

Woolton, in fact, is such a respectable, desirable and featureless suburb as grows up close to any British industrial city. Until 1963, it had only one claim on history. A lord of the same name was Britain's wartime Minister of Food and inventor of the "Woolton Pie," which boasted total, if unappetizing, nourishment for only one old shilling a portion.

The country village which Woolton used to be is still distinguishable in narrow lanes winding up to its red sandstone Parish Church, St. Peter's. In 1945, it was still more villagelike. It even had its own small dairy farm, to which people would go for fresh milk ladled straight from the churn. The farm and dairy belonged to George Smith, the quiet, kind-hearted man whom high-spirited Mimi Stanley had married.

George and Mimi lived at "Mendips," a semidetached house on Menlove Avenue, around the corner from the dairy, almost opposite Allerton golf course. It was a solid, respectable 1930s bay-windowed villa with Tudor touches, like the wood-paneled front hall where Spode and Royal Worcester dinner plates stood on exhibition. There was a "morning room" where Mimi and Julia would tie the baby in his armchair with a scarf and bank him up with cushions to get the benefit of the sun in the big rear window. A man who worked for George at the dairy came in twice a week to look after the garden.

Julia had settled only a short bus journey away, at Spring Wood. Her man friend was a waiter in a Liverpool hotel, with children of his own. Every afternoon, she went over to her sister's to see John. He called her "Mummy": his aunt he called plain "Mimi." "John said to me once when he was little, 'Why don't I call you Mummy?' I said, 'Well--you couldn't very well have two Mummies, could you?' He accepted that."

From the moment Julia gave him to her, Mimi devoted her life to John. "Never a day passed when I wasn't with him -- just that one time a year when he went up to Scotland to stay with his cousins. And at night for ten years, I never crossed the threshold of that house. As I came downstairs, I'd always leave the light on on the landing outside his room. This little voice would come after me, 'Mimi! Don't waste light.'

"I brought him up strictly. No sweets -- just one barley sugar at night -- and no sitting around in picturedomes. He never wanted it. He'd play for hours in the garden in summer, in his little swimming trunks. I'd go to the butcher's for pheasants' feathers and I'd make him up like an Indian with gravy, browning, and put lipstick for warpaint on his cheeks. And when he said his friends were dead, they were dead.

"He never had a day's illness. Only chicken pox. 'Chicken pots,' he called it. And he loved his Uncle George. I felt quite left out of that. They'd go off together, just leaving me a bar of chocolate and a note saying, 'Have a happy day.'"

Mimi, for all her briskness, liked nothing better than laughter. Julia had always known how to get her going so that she threw her head back and guffawed, slapping her knee. "I was very slim in those days. Julia would come in in the afternoon and dance up to me, singing, 'O dem bones, dem bones --' She'd only got to lift her eyebrow and I'd be off.

"John was the same. I'd be battling with him. I'd send him out of the room, then I'd flop down exhausted in the big armchair next to the morning room window. He'd crawl round on the path and pull faces at me through the window. He'd come at me like a monster, going, 'Woooo!' He could get me off just the same way Julia could."

When John was four, Mimi sent him to Dovedale Primary School, near Penny Lane. She took him there each morning, and each afternoon met him at the bus stop, near the Penny Lane roundabout. In his class at Dovedale Primary was a boy named Peter Harrison whose younger brother, George, sometimes came with their mother to meet the 3:30 outpouring from school.

John did well at Dovedale, learning to read by the age of four-and-a-half. He liked sports, especially running and swimming, but was poor at football. The discovery was made that he had chronically poor eyesight. His teachers thought that must be what made his English compositions so unusual. He changed almost every word into another one like it. Instead of "funds," he would write "funs." He loved reading, especially Richmal Crompton's Just William stories about a lawless eleven-year-old. He loved writing and drawing and crayoning. Each Christmas, when Mimi took him to the pantomime at the Liverpool Empire, he would endlessly retell the experience in stories, poems and drawings. At the age of seven, he began writing books of his own. One of them was called Sport and Speed Illustrated: it had cartoons and drawings and a serial story ending: "If you liked this, come again next week. It'll be even better."

At about the same age, while playing on a rubbish pile, John encountered another seven-year-old with a pale pink and white face and fuzzy blonde hair. The boy's name was Peter Shotton: his mother kept a small needlewoman's and grocery shop in Woolton village. The encounter quickly turned to combat. "I'd found out his name was Winston," Shotton says. "I was calling out to him, 'Winnie, Winnie...' He got me down on the ground with his knees on my shoulders. I said, 'Okay, go ahead and hit me. Get it over with.' But he couldn't. He said, 'Okay, I'll let you off. Just don't call me that name again.' I walked away, then I turned around and shouted, 'Winnie, Winnie...' He was so angry, he couldn't speak. Then I saw his face break into a smile."

Pete Shotton and John Lennon became inseparable friends. Pete lived on Vale Road, just around the corner from Menlove Avenue. The addition of another Vale Road boy, a mutual acquaintance named Nigel Whalley, added a new dimension. Three of them made enough for a gang.

Nigel went to school with Pete Shotton on Mosspits Lane. He also sang in the choir with John at St. Peter's, Woolton. He had often sat in the choirstalls in his white surplice, wriggling with laughter at things which the white-surpliced John dared to do. "He'd steal the Harvest Festival fruit. And every time Old Pricey, the rector, climbed into the pulpit, John used to say, 'He's getting on his drums now.'"

The gang grew to four with the arrival of another Dovedale boy, Ivan Vaughan. Thus constituted, the gang embarked on its career as the terror of Woolton. One of the earliest games was to climb a tree over the busy main road and dangle a leg down in the front of an approaching double-decker bus, then yank it back to safety in the nick of time. If your foot scraped the bus roof, that counted as extra points.

"John was always the leader," Nigel Whalley says. "He was always the one to dare you. He never cared what he said or did. He'd think nothing of putting a brick through the glass in a street lamp. He'd dare us to go with him and play on the Allerton golf course, trying to hit golf balls across Menlove Avenue. Once, the police came and chased us off. We'd pick up these great clods of earth to chuc...

About this edition

• Publisher: Fireside
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684830671
• ISBN 13: 9780684830674
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 448