John Lennon might have been older, but Paul McCartney had more talent on guitar when the two met as teenagers in 1957. It was that talent that earned him Lennon’s respect and a spot in his skiffle group, the Quarrymen. And, as McCartney reveals in a 1999 interview, it was all due to one song.
It was July 6 of that year when their fateful meeting took place at St Peter's Church Hall fête in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi. McCartney only attended the event because of his mate Ivan Vaughan, who was a friend of Lennon’s.
“He used to be in one of the little skiffle groups that John was in,” McCartney told British TV host Michael Parkinson in a 1999 interview for his BBC talk show, Parkinson. “So he said you should come along to this thing. You know this group's playing, and my mate John's in it.”
The Quarrymen were a rough-and-tumble skiffle act consisting of Lennon and a group of musical friends from the Quarry Bank High School. McCartney and Vaughan arrived in time to catch the band's afternoon set and see Lennon sing “Come Go With Me,” by the Del Vikings. Lennon didn’t know the words and improvised them, which McCartney found both amusing and impressive.
“John just looked like he had something,” he told Parkinson. “What happened was, they did their first set and then they had a break, and then they were due to do the evening set. So the break was an opportunity for the band to get drunk, really.”
By the time Vaughan took McCartney around to meet the band, Lennon had had a few beers, he recalls. When Vaughan explained that McCartney played guitar, Lennon asked him to play.
“One of them lent me his guitar and I had to turn it right, because I'm left-handed,” he said. “They wouldn't let me change the strings. But because I had a mate who had a right-handed guitar, I'd learned to play upside down. So that was a little bit impressive.
“But I also knew the words to this song that they all loved,” he continues. “And they didn't know the words. That was enough to get me in.”
The song was Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock.” Cochran and his band had performed the tune in the 1956 U.S. musical comedy The Girl Can’t Help It, which also featured standout performances by McCartney favorites Fats Domino, Little Richard and Gene Vincent (who would also prove to be a big influence on Jimmy Page). But it was Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” that had captured the hearts of young guitarists with its insistent riff and Cochran’s twanging, heavily vibratoed voice.
Despite the song's popularity, there was a good reason Lennon and his group didn't know the lyrics: The tune hadn’t been released yet, not even in America. Cochran recorded it for release after the movie, in May and August 1957, but it still wasn’t issued until the following November. And it wasn’t even released as a single in the U.K.
The absence of a record didn't matter at all to the song's popularity. The Girl Can’t Help It and the musicians it showcased made a huge impact on Liverpool teens, who were enthralled by the performances. Thanks to the film, Little Richard began selling more records in Liverpool than Elvis Presley. It is undoubtedly the reason Richard began touring England, where he found he could play bigger and better venues than in the U.S., where he was usually relegated to dingy clubs.
As for McCartney, upon seeing the movie he headed out to his local record store to order Cochran's record, only to learn it wasn’t available. So how did he know the lyrics? He was a huge fan of The Girl Can’t Help It and had apparently seen it several times during its seven-week run at the Scala Cinema on Liverpool’s Lime Street. “We idolized these people, and we always thought they were given crummy treatment — until The Girl Can't Help It," he said in the Beatles’ Anthology book. The film was so important to him that the Beatles took a break from recording "Birthday" for the White Album on September 18, 1968 so they could so go to McCartney's house to watch the film's British TV premiere.
Cochran, in particular, was appealing to musically inclined teens. He was just 19 at the time — not much older than Lennon or McCartney — and played a gorgeous Gretsch 6120 hollowbody electric guitar. And, as McCartney explains to Parkinson’s audience, it was his “Twenty Flight Rock” that would bring him and John Lennon together, setting the stage for the creation of the Beatles.
“So I'll just do a little bit of it,” McCartney said to Parkinson’s audience. “Show you what got me in the Beatles.”
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