I’ve been a Beatles fan from just about the beginning. I started collecting their albums at age 8 in early 1964, just after they first hit America. I’ll forever regret that I didn’t see their Ed Sullivan Show appearances. My parents didn’t have anything against the Beatles, but they loathed Mr. Sullivan.
In addition to buying their records, I also started reading books and magazine articles about the Beatles early on, although I didn’t start collecting some of the major Beatles books until the 1990s, when my pocketbook finally allowed such extravagance.
So I suppose I am a minor example of what Hunter Davies in The Quarrymen refers to as “Beatle Heads,” those people around the world who know vast amounts of Beatles trivia. I knew long ago that their first band was called the Quarrymen, and that they also went through other incarnations as Johnny and the Moondogs and the Silver Beatles, and had other members like Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best. Thus it was with keen anticipation that I approached this book by Davies, who wrote the Beatles’ 1968 authorized biography. Perhaps my expectations were too high, because I found The Quarrymen disappointing.
The Quarrymen were a skiffle group, its members all in their mid-teens. Skiffle was a version of folk that became very popular in England after Lonnie Donegan had a huge hit with his version of Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line.” Skiffle was played on simple instruments: guitars, banjos, sometimes drums, washboard and a one-string homemade bass made of a broomstick and tea chest. Skiffle bands often reduced a song to only one chord and played them all at pretty much the same tempo, a medium-fast shuffle. In a way, it was a precursor of punk, because just about anybody with a modicum of skill and energy could play it.
And that’s what John Lennon and his friends did. They mostly attended the Quarry Bank school, although some went to other Liverpool schools. Some of them were the same age and in the same classes, something called “fifth form,” but don’t ask me to explain the English school system and its levels. That’s one of the problems with this book; Davies doesn’t explain many pure Englishisms, slang terms and other arcana, such as A-Levels, O-Levels, forms, etc.
John, who was a budding artist and writer, got a guitar from his mother, Julia, and decided to start a skiffle group. His first recruit was his best friend Pete Shotton. They had a fairly fluid lineup for several months until by the time of their first performance they had settled on John, Pete, Eric Griffiths, Rod Davis, Len Garry and Colin Hanton. This was the sextet that was in the famous photo of the band, which is used on the book’s cover, showing John front and center, strumming and singing.
Davies’ book follows the six boys from early childhood through the formation of the group and beyond, to their lives as adults and finally their reunion and tours in the late 90s. The early chapters are interesting, filling in details about their early years and recounting the group’s formation and early performances.
The Quarrymen, like any other band that ever was, practiced in each other’s homes and played for church and neighborhood dances and school functions. They even played some actual clubs, like the now-famous Cavern. It was all quite fun, but never much more than that.
Then Paul McCartney came on board, and shortly the young George Harrison. Both were more musically savvy than most of the rest of the band, more into rock ‘n’ roll than skiffle, and McCartney had the drive to push them to the next stage and beyond. A couple of members were eased out to make room for them, and others dropped out along the way as other interests, like girls and jobs, took precedence.
The rest of the book follows the rest of the band into adulthood. Always their lives are played out against the backdrop of what the Beatles were doing, although none of them except Shotton was ever involved with the Beatles. In fact, they didn’t really follow the Beatles’ careers and didn’t even like their music all that much.
Davies writes in a breezy, gee-whiz style, quite often inserting himself into the narrative, either as interviewer or commentator — he himself is a Liverpudlian, although he was of a lower social and economic class than the Quarrymen and Beatles. Davies’ “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” humor wears thin quickly: in later chapters about the band’s reunion and subsequent performances and tours, he time after time refers to them as “men of a certain age.”
I found it hard to keep the five “other” Quarrymen straight except for Pete. Each chapter is broken into sections for each band member, and it should have been easy and would have been very helpful to have a photo of the subject at the beginning of each section. There is a good selection of photos of the subjects from childhood through today, but it’s inconvenient to have to keep flipping forward or back to figure out which one you’re reading about now.
Davies often allows the subjects to tell about themselves in their own words at length, and at times he attempts to point out where their memories may be faulty, or where their versions of the facts differ. But he gives Shotton, who remained close to Lennon until the then ex-Beatle moved to America in the ’70s, a lot of lattitude to tell horror stories about Yoko Ono’s behavior, with no apparent attempt to get Ono’s side of the story or compare Shotton’s version of the facts with anybody else’s.
Mostly, though, the book boils down to the life stories of five fellows whose only distinction from anybody else is that they were in “the skiffle group that started The Beatles,” as the cover blurb would have it. Other than that one fact, as they themselves would tell you, their lives aren’t any more interesting than yours and mine, try as the author might to pad it from a Sunday supplement or People magazine article into a book.
The Quarrymen is a mildly entertaining read for “Beatle Heads” who must have every last word ever written about the Fab Four. It’s not the worst Beatles book ever written. But this one is mainly for completists.
(Omnibus, 2001)
