The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  Now he takes in a deep breath and imagines himself standing outside the Dakota. He is Saint Peter the Apostle among the throng of Lennon disciples. They’re all anxious to catch a glimpse of their false god, but only he has a testament to preach. With the Charter Arms as his witness.

  In his mind, he sees a limousine pull up to the curb. Lennon gets out, alone, because he doesn’t travel with bodyguards. He’s a man of the people.

  Lennon gives a quick wave, then dashes toward the Dakota’s front entrance.

  “Mr. Lennon?”

  Mark imagines Lennon ignoring him. He’ll make the man finally see. Mark swiftly removes the handgun, watches his reflection drop into a combat stance.

  “Mr. Lennon.”

  This time, Lennon pays attention. He turns, sees the gun pointed at him, but it’s too late.

  Inside the room, Mark pulls the trigger. It clicks softly, because there’s no ammo, but in his mind, he hears the gunshot go off. He sees Lennon collapse against the pavement. Lennon looks like he’s about to say something—“I’m sorry,” maybe, or “Please forgive me for my sins”—and Mark squeezes the trigger again.

  And again.

  Again.

  All five shots.

  It’s over. Lennon is dead.

  * * *

  Mark loads the hollow-points given to him in Atlanta by his cop friend, Dana. There’s nothing more power-packed than these babies, Dana had told him. Dana thinks Mark needs the ammo for protection on the dangerous streets of New York.

  Dana had taken him into the woods for target practice and gave him some valuable pointers.

  Mark’s aim has improved considerably.

  Lennon doesn’t stand a chance.

  Mark puts on his brimless Russian hat with its fake fur. He slips the .38 into his pocket and holds it.

  The gun feels warm in his hands.

  Mark smiles. Happy.

  Chapter 6

  There’s something happening here.

  —“For What It’s Worth”

  On May 5, 1960, John Lennon heads to Slater Street’s Jacaranda Club, which has a jukebox and an Italian espresso machine. Coffee bars like this are popular teenage hangouts, and at night, downstairs in the former coal cellar, the Jacaranda has a members-only club for up-and-coming bands.

  Now John finds Allan Williams standing behind the Jacaranda’s counter. Williams, a tiny man with a black bushy beard, has suddenly become a key player in the Liverpool music scene.

  “Allan,” John says, “why don’t you do something for us?”

  Williams adjusts the black top hat he wears all the time, even in the summer.

  “How do you mean ‘us’? Who’s us?”

  “My group,” John says. “The Beatles.”

  John’s inspiration comes from the Crickets, Buddy Holly’s band, as well as his love for wordplay. Changing the second e to an a gives “Beatles” a double meaning—both crawling things and rhythmic music.

  John’s heard that there’s an audition with Billy Fury and tells Williams that he wants to be part of it.

  Williams nods. “Sure. What’s your group’s lineup?”

  John tells him about Paul and George and their new member, Stuart Sutcliffe, a fellow student from art college. Williams knows Stu as the student who painted the murals in the basement of the Jacaranda—but when Stu sells an abstract painting at Walker Art Gallery, John persuades him to use the windfall to purchase a Hofner 333 four-string bass. Stu doesn’t know how to play it yet, but John’s certain he’ll learn.

  Besides, Stu looks the part. He’s a thin guy with a Vandyke beard who looks a lot like American actor James Dean. According to George, John wanted Stu in the band because he “looks so cool.” He wears shades clipped on his eyeglasses.

  “Who’s the drummer?” Williams asks.

  “We haven’t got one,” John admits.

  “I’ll try to find you one,” Williams assures him. He delivers a fellow named Tommy Moore. Moore’s married and old—almost twenty-nine—but promises to come to the audition on May 10, after his shift at the Garston Bottle Company factory.

  They’ve upgraded their clothes—to black shirts and jeanslike trousers—and their equipment. George has a new guitar, a Futurama, and Paul purchased an Elpico amplifier. John’s former guitar, a gift from his mother, broke into pieces after all the playing. Mimi refused to buy him another one (“If you want it,” she told him, “prove it”), which forced him to get an actual job, laboring to construct the city’s new water pumping station. His hands bled every day of the long, hot summer.

  John bumps into Brian Casser, the lead singer of Cass and the Cassanovas. “What’s your group called again?” Casser asks John.

  “The Beatles.”

  Casser laughs at the unusual name. They go around and around until John settles on Long John and the Silver Beatles.

  When their turn arrives, they play three songs—John taking lead in one, Paul taking lead in the second, the third an instrumental. Stu, who doesn’t know the proper notes, plays with his back to music promoter Larry Parnes and the rest of the auditioners. It was Paul’s suggestion—he called it “doing a moody,” as if Stu, with his dark glasses, was too cool to be bothered.

  Long John and the Silver Beatles fail the audition. The band needs a lot more practice.

  * * *

  Williams lets them use the Jacaranda cellar for rehearsals. George ties a microphone to a broomstick, and Cynthia Powell, John’s girlfriend from art college, holds it up for whoever is singing.

  One day, they have an audience—Rory Storm and his band the Hurricanes, with guitarist Johnny Guitar and drummer Ringo Starr, whose real name is Richard “Richy” Starkey.

  “Why Ringo?” Cyn asks him.

  He holds up a hand and says, “Because I wear three rings. That’s what they called me at first—Rings.” He tells Cyn the story behind each one. “This one’s from me mum I got when I was sixteen, this one’s an engagement ring from me girlfriend, and this one’s me granddad’s wedding ring I got when he died.”

  “He looked like a tough guy,” George says after Ringo and his bandmates leave, “with that gray streak in his hair and half a gray eyebrow and that big nose.”

  John agrees. They all do.

  Chapter 7

  What can a poor boy do

  ’Cept to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band?

  —“Street Fighting Man”

  The ballroom in Scotland’s Alloa Town Hall is huge, beautiful—and packed. Larry Parnes has sent the Silver Beatles on a ten-day tour of Scotland as a backing band to Johnny Gentle. The group performs three songs, two of which are Elvis numbers—“Teddy Bear” and “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”—and then the headliner makes his entrance. True to his name, he’s quiet and relaxed. They play behind him for half an hour.

  It’s a disaster.

  * * *

  “We were crummy, horrible,” George says as they’re packing up their equipment. “An embarrassment.”

  George isn’t wrong.

  Worse, they find out that one of the local promoters called Parnes to complain: “They’re a scruffy no-good group.”

  Johnny Gentle, though, seems okay. A ship’s carpenter, he built his own guitar, and he can write songs. While they’re in Inverness, he shows John and George an unfinished song of his, which “was fine up to the middle-eight.”

  John helps him with the lyrics.

  Now the song flows.

  “That’s great,” Johnny says, impressed. “I’m going to use it.”

  They’ve been promised £75 for the gig, and it hasn’t come through. They sleep in the van; one night in a hayloft. It’s a miserable week, but “a vital experience for us,” Paul later says, “because after that we knew it was no breeze—you’d have to work hard and sort out where the money was coming from. It taught us a lot of lessons.”

  Ten days later, they arrive back home. John gets the results of his exams. Not only did he fail, he also got a “red letter�
�� from the Liverpool College of Art that says, “Don’t bother coming back next September.”

  Mimi is shattered. Her view of John’s future is blacker than ever.

  Paul, too, is facing pressure. His father wants him to go get a job. Same with George, who lost his electrician apprenticeship when he left for Scotland.

  “Well,” Paul says when they all get together, in the early days of August, “what are we going to do?”

  Allan Williams comes to them a week later, on August 11, 1960.

  “Good news, lads. The Silver Beatles are going to play in Hamburg, Germany.”

  He sets one tough condition. “No drummer, no trip.”

  Paul has a solution. “What about the son of the owner of the Casbah Club?”

  “Pete Best?” John asks.

  Paul nods. “He’s got his own drum kit.”

  Eighteen-year-old Pete is clearly a beginner, but “he could keep one beat going for long enough,” says John.

  Chapter 8

  When I left my home and my family

  I was no more than a boy…

  —“The Boxer”

  They arrive in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district around midnight, after traveling by ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and then by van to Germany.

  After signing contracts in German and English, they’re shown to their dank, dismal living quarters behind the movie screen of the Bambi porno theater—“a pigsty…a run down fleapit”—across from the Indra Club, where they’ll be working for Bruno Koschmider, a fiftysomething former circus performer who limps from a war injury.

  “You’re to play four and a half hours during the weeknights,” Koschmider tells them through an interpreter. “You’ll get three breaks, thirty minutes each. Weekends, you play six hours.”

  John feels the blood drain from his face. The longest we’ve ever played is twenty minutes. Now we’re being asked to play for up to six hours—for the next forty-eight nights?

  The Beatles take the small podium stage. It’s eight o’clock on August 17, 1960. Twenty years earlier, Germany attacked Liverpool for the first time when Nazi planes dropped bombs on the docks.

  Pete Best can’t maintain an even tempo, but he’s pretty good when he uses the pedal for the big bass drum. “We kept that big heavy four-in-a-bar going all night long,” recalls George. The crowds start to swell along with the noise.

  The Germans love it.

  Night after night.

  During their time at the Indra, the Beatles log 204 stage hours—or, if they were playing back home, 136 ninety-minute shows.

  “Your voice began to hurt with the pain of singing,” John recalls, not unhappily, of suffering what they called “Hamburg throat.” To “keep it up for twelve hours at a time, we really had to hammer. We never would have developed as much if we’d stayed home.”

  By the time Allan Williams returns, in mid-October, he’s amazed at how good they’ve become. “We were the best bloody band there was,” John would reminisce about these early days. “There was nobody to touch us.”

  Whenever they’re down and need a boost, John channels a clichéd cigar-chomping studio agent and, in a bad American accent, says, “Where are we going, fellers?”

  They answer in their own awful American accents: “To the top, Johnny!”

  “Where’s that, fellers?”

  “To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!”

  “Riiiiight!”

  Bruno Koschmider offers them a new contract—October through the end of the year—at his bigger, more popular club, the Kaiserkeller, where they can split the weekend hours with another group.

  “And who’s this other band?” John asks.

  “Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.”

  They’re on par with Liverpool’s top group.

  Chapter 9

  Man, I was mean but I’m changing my scene…

  —“Getting Better”

  Paul needs a new guitar. The one he’s got now is breaking down from all the wear and tear. John has his eye on a Rickenbacker 325 with a natural blond finish and an American-made eighteen-watt Fender Deluxe.

  Paul also thinks they need a new bassist. Stuart’s playing has improved, but he doesn’t take the music seriously. “Our band would be great,” Paul says, “but with him on bass there was always something holding us back.”

  Paul’s never really liked Stu, John knows, and it’s not helped now by jealousy over Stu’s stunningly gorgeous new photographer girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr. Astrid and her friend Klaus Voormann, two young, arty Germans, have recently befriended the band. Truth be told, John’s a bit peeved Astrid hasn’t fallen in love with him.

  Not that Paul’s wrong about Stu. “The guy really couldn’t play bass to save his life,” says Tony Sheridan, a British rocker considered “the guv’nor” of the Hamburg scene. “He was 90 percent image, and the most you want is 50 percent because the other 50 percent must be a musical talent.”

  They didn’t have to worry about Stu, though, as he’s made it clear he plans on quitting the group. He’s going to ask Astrid to marry him.

  “Well, we’ve got to do something about Pete,” Paul continues. “His drumming just isn’t cutting it.”

  If only they could use Ringo.

  They’ve been spending a lot of time with Ringo, the drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, drinking, getting to know him. The drummer George had thought “looked the nasty one” when they first met “turned out to be Ringo, the nicest of them all.”

  “We liked his style,” John agrees, “but we’d only just got the other drummer so we couldn’t do anything about it.”

  Instead, John tells the band that he’s arranged a higher-paying gig—at the Top Ten Club.

  Paul and George light up with excitement. The Top Ten is a real rock club, not a bar offering music—and it has a phenomenal sound system. They’ve visited it a few times and even played there with Tony Sheridan.

  On November 28, Stu makes it official: he and Astrid have exchanged rings. They’re engaged.

  Bruno Koschmider calls them all into his office. He’s gotten wind of John’s Top Ten plan.

  His interpreter does all the talking. “Sign this,” he says, handing them each an agreement stating that the Beatles will not play any other Hamburg club in December.

  John refuses, tossing the paper on the man’s desk.

  Concurrently, it seems, the German authorities have discovered that seventeen-year-old George is too young to qualify for a proper work permit, so he’s being deported immediately. He stays up the whole night, teaching his guitar part to John. “I felt terrible,” recalls George. “I had visions of our band staying on there with me stuck in Liverpool, and that would be it.”

  The rest of the Beatles grab their equipment and bring everything over to the Top Ten. As a parting gift, Paul and Pete hang a few condoms from nails on the walls of their rooms and try to light them on fire. It causes a bit of smoke damage on the concrete, but mainly just stinks up the place.

  The next day, John, Paul, and Pete are arrested by the German Polizei for “attempted arson.”

  Stuart finds out what’s going on and comes into the station to sign a statement written in German that says he didn’t know about the fire. After some individual interrogations, the police let them all go—only for Paul and Pete to again be picked up by the police at the Top Ten Club the next morning, taken directly to the airport in handcuffs, handed their passports, and put on a plane—their first flight ever!—back to London. Stu stays behind with Astrid, but John follows on his own shortly after.

  Slinking home this way, under such ignominious circumstances, doesn’t inspire confidence in anyone.

  Is this what I want to do? Is this it? John’s left to wonder. Should I continue doing this? The Beatles, he’s thinking, may be finished.

  Chapter 10

  So you wanna be a rock ’n’ roll star?

  —“So You Wanna Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star”

  John’s
fears are premature.

  Once George turns eighteen, at the end of February in 1961, he, Paul, John, and Pete all head back to Hamburg, performing at the Top Ten alongside higher-caliber acts like Tony Sheridan.

  They even record seven songs with Sheridan that June under the name Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers. They include five covers that Sheridan sings—“My Bonnie,” “The Saints,” “Why,” “Nobody’s Child,” and “Take Out Some Insurance”—plus the Tin Pan Alley standard “Ain’t She Sweet,” sung by John, and an instrumental, “Cry for a Shadow,” cowritten by George and John. Aunt Mimi later would proudly play the “My Bonnie” single for her lodgers, viewing it as the first evidence that John might have a future in music.

  With Stuart’s defection from the band, Paul’s been “lumbered” with playing the bass, but he refuses to take Stu’s cast-off instrument and instead gets himself a left-handed Hofner 500/1. Klaus takes Stu’s old bass instead.

  It’s progress…yet John can’t escape the feeling of time passing. “I wasn’t too keen on reaching twenty-one,” he admits, feeling I’m too old. I’ve missed the boat. You’ve got to be seventeen. As he says later, “A lot of stars were kids, much younger than I was.”

  John continues to feel I’m gonna make it, but when and how remain elusive. He just knows they have something.

  And he’s not the only one who feels that way. The Beatles drew packed crowds in Hamburg, and their popularity only increases once they’re back home. So much so that customers are coming into NEMS, the biggest and best record store in Liverpool, asking for the single of “My Bonnie” that the Beatles recorded with Sheridan.

  At the Cavern, DJ and host Bob Wooler introduces the boys by the nicknames he’s given them. “John Lennon, ‘The Singing Rage!’ Paul McCartney, ‘The Rockin’ Riot!’ George Harrison, ‘Sheik of Araby!’ And Pete Best, ‘The Bashful Beat!’”