Free Shout! by Philip Norman

had been preceded by a Donald Duck cartoon. One did not have to guess from whom, in the tittering auditorium, had come those cries of, “There he is! There’s old King Henry!”
    For John, as for most fifteen-year-olds, rock ’n’ roll began as a curiosity manifest among slightly older boys. Pete Shotton and he, on their truant-playing days, would often hang around Liverpool gaping at the full-dress Teddy Boys—mostly seamen on leave from the big ships—whose disregard for authority was on a scale far more gorgeous than theirs. When Rock Around the Clock , the first Bill Haley film, reached Liverpool, John went to see it, but to his disappointment, no riot happened. There was just this fat man in a tartan jacket with a kiss curl on his forehead, and saxophones and double basses just like any dance band.
    Then, at the beginning of 1956, a friend played “Heartbreak Hotel” for him. “From then on,” his Aunt Mimi said, “I never got a minute’s peace. It was Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley. In the end I said, ‘Elvis Presley’s all very well, John, but I don’t want him for breakfast, dinner, and tea.’”
    Mimi had been struggling for months to keep her charge from turning into a Teddy Boy. She still sent John to school in blazers that were tailor-made, and saw no reason why these should not do for all social occasions. “Drainpipe” trousers and drape jackets were, as Mimi constantly affirmed, no kind of dress for a boy who went to Quarry Bank. The trouble was that John now spent more and more time out of Mimi’s sight with her sister, Julia, his real mother. Julia, as Mimi knew, was too easygoing to worry what John wore. Julia bought him colored shirts and gave him money to have school trousers “taken in.” He would leave Menlove Avenue a nice Quarry Bank schoolboy and then, at Julia’s, turn into a Teddy Boy as bad as any to be seen around the docks.
    The stunning music that went with the clothes was available onlywith equal deviousness. John listened to it, as thousands did, under the bedclothes, late at night. Since the BBC would not broadcast rock ’n’ roll, the only source was Radio Luxembourg, a commercial station, beamed from the Continent with an English service after 8:00 P.M . The Elvis records came through, fading and blurred with static, like coded messages to an occupied country. Now there were other names and other songs that split open the consciousness with disbelieving joy. There was Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”; Bill Haley’s “Razzle Dazzle”; Freddy Bell and the Bellboys’ “Giddy-up-a-Ding-Dong.” The sound came from beyond comprehension; it played, then died out again. You could not catch it, nor sing it nor write it down.
    Then, late one night over the hidden radios, a new message came. A banjo player with the Chris Barber Jazz Band had formed his own small group to record “Rock Island Line,” an American folk song dating back to the Depression, or earlier. The number was played in what jazz audiences knew already as skiffle, a style originating in the poor Southern states where people would hold rent parties to stave off the landlord, playing music on kazoos, tin cans, and other impromptu instruments. The banjoist, Tony—or “Lonnie”—Donegan, sang in a piercing pseudoblues wail, set about by elementary rhythm of which the main component was an ordinary kitchen washboard, scraped and tapped by thimble-capped fingers.
    “Rock Island Line” began a national craze. For anyone could form a skiffle group simply by stealing his mother’s washboard and fixing a broom handle to a tea chest, then stringing it with wire to make a rudimentary double bass. The biggest craze of all, thanks to Elvis Presley, was for guitars. A straitlaced instrument long muffled in orchestral rhythm sections found itself suddenly the focus of all adolescent desire.
    As boys pestered throughout Britain, so did John Lennon pester his aunt Mimi to buy him a guitar. Each