First Instruments
A toy drum, a ‘horrible cheapo guitar’, a mouth iron & a trumpet
Three of The Beatles had opportunities to study music either at school or through private tuition. None got past the first few lessons or the first one in John’s case. Ringo effectively bypassed education altogether.
All learned to play through trial and experimentation.
John
John Lennon’s earliest music experience came via an unlikely source.
“I played a lot of harmonica & mouth organ when I was a child. We used to take in students and one of them had a mouth organ and said he’d buy me one if I could learn a tune by the next morning. So I learnt two.”
The instrument was suited to his musical strengths — an innate sense of time and rhythm. It also allowed him to be improvisatory, without having to study either theory or technique.
In his early teens, John began seeing more of his mother, Julia. She played various instruments and taught him some banjo chords. Julia also inspired her son with impromptu ‘turns’ at family parties.
It was Aunt Mimi, however, who provided practical encouragement for John’s interest in music. She bought him a relatively expensive first guitar and also enrolled him in the local church choir. There he gained practical experience of harmonization. He could also have learned basic sight reading if so inclined (he wasn’t).
Contrary to her Cruella Deville reputation, Mimi also had a sense of fun. She shared her sister’s love of show tunes and music hall numbers, often singing them while shining every surface of Mendips.
Paul
Paul’s father, Jim, was a semi-professional musician. He had taught himself various instruments including the piano, double bass and the E-flat tuba. He also sang and gigged in local ragtime groups and a brass band.
Jim McCartney actively encouraged his two sons to take up his interest. They grew up watching him practise piano in the front room — and Paul dabbled with the instrument from early childhood. Jim would also use old 78s to demonstrate harmonisation: how instruments and voices interacted.
The death of Paul’s ‘mother Mary’ after short, brutal, unacknowledged struggle with cancer shattered what had been a happy and productive family. Soon after Jim bought Paul his first instrument — a trumpet — for his fourteenth birthday. Though Paul ‘loved it’, he had eyes for another shiny beauty in Rushworth & Draper’s Music Shop
I persevered with the trumpet for a while. I learnt ‘The Saints’, which I can still play in C. I learnt my C scale, and a couple of things. Then I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to sing with this thing stuck in my mouth, so I asked my dad if he’d mind if I swapped it for a guitar, which also fascinated me. He didn’t, and I traded my trumpet in for an acoustic guitar, a Zenith, which I still have.
This confirms that Paul studied or was taught the concept of scales. But he had no inclination to continue studying music theory, which at that time was almost exclusively classically orientated. In the McCartney house, they preferred to ‘recognise the tune’ as Mel Tome put it — whether listening to the radio or in ‘sing-alongs’ around the piano at family get-togethers.
George
Paul went to the august Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — where he would be joined by another budding musician, George Harrison. Neither was interested in the school’s classically orientated course in music. For its part, the music department had no intention of adding Chuck Berry to the curriculum.
Neither of George’s parents were musicians but they actively supported his painstaking efforts to learn guitar. He turned down lessons, preferring to teach himself using Johnny Rector’s Guitar Progressions
The secret sauce of George’s self-study was immense resolution. In the mid- Sixties he would apply this again to mastering the radically different conventions of the Indian musical tradition
Richard/Ringo
Only Ringo certainly could genuinely claim to have been deprived of the opportunity to study music. Prolonged periods of ill health in his Dickensian childhood meant that he missed years of school, and spent an entire year in hospital at the age of thirteen. It was there that a kindly health worker delivered a toy-sized drum starter kit to his bed.
Yet even Ringo was eventually offered classes. He, too, chose to pass.
‘I went to this man in a house, who played drums, got a manuscript and wrote it all down. I had about three lessons and never went back. It was all too routine for me, all those paradiddles and that. I couldn’t stand it.’
Further isolated by an instrument which did not immediately encourage sociability, this sickly only child seemed unlikely to survive the rough house of the local Liverpool music scene. Yet despite all these problems he had two priceless qualities for any musician — an instinctive sense of time and an ability to get on with his band mates.
Gifted?
All four Beatles took up music as a pastime, a fun activity to dabble in. Music converted into notes on a stave did not appeal — it seemed like Maths. The long hours of ‘routine’ and rote learning, were also a hard sell to instinctively rebellious teenagers. They wanted to leave school, not have more of it
Doubtless their teachers lost little sleep over the loss of these reluctant students. None was an obvious musical prodigy.
Ringo’s distinctive left-handed drum technique appeared to be a design flaw rather than a feature. George was a surly plodder, methodical but resistant to guidance.
Paul was considered a good student by his school and was clearly a naturally gifted musician. His approach, however, was idiosyncratic. From the start, he rejected sight-reading, perhaps intuiting that this was never going to work for him. In an inflexible system, he combined Ringo’s left-handed quirks with George’s stubbornness.
At his school, there was some recognition that John was ‘artistic’, though this was more for his drawing than evidence of outstanding musical potential. His headmaster ultimately steered him towards art school, largely because this seemed the best fit with his unruly personality.
As Aunt Mimi would famously remarked her nephew had to do something.
Playing the guitar is all very well, John, but you’ll never make a living at it.
