Paul McCartney got the feeling John Lennon didn’t want to associate with him the first time they met in 1957. The “Yesterday” singer was two years younger than the Quarry Men frontman.
Paul McCartney thought John Lennon was ‘ingenious’ the first time he saw The Quarry Men perform
In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that he’d seen John around Liverpool before they officially met in 1957. Paul said he thought John looked cool, but he doesn’t know if they’d have started talking to each other.
Luckily, the pair had a mutual friend, Ivan Vaughan. He invited Paul to the Woolton Village Fête at St Peter’s Church on a hot July day in 1957 to see John and his band, The Quarry Men, perform. Paul initially agreed to go because he wanted to “pick up a girl.” However, he became awestruck once he saw the skiffle group performing on a tiny flatbed truck.
During an interview for The Beatles Anthology, Paul remembered that he landed eyes on John immediately as he came to the church’s field. The frontman seemed “cool,” wearing his checkered shirt and playing a guitar “guaranteed not to crack.”
Paul was amazed. He realized the frontman was the same guy he’d seen around Liverpool. The Quarry Men were good, but they weren’t that good. What was interesting about them was what John was doing.
The Quarry Men were playing The Del-Vikings’ “Come Go With Me.” Paul realized John only vaguely knew the lyrics and improvised. “He was singing something like ‘Come, come, come, come, go with me, down to the penitentiary,’” Paul remembered. “Those are definitely not the words, but he must have pulled that from Lead Belly or somebody else. I thought that was pretty ingenious of him.”
Paul got the feeling John didn’t want to associate with him when they met
Vaughan introduced his friends to one another in between The Quarry Men’s performances. Paul had his guitar with him and played “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran, his “party piece.”
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John was impressed Paul knew all the words. However, Paul got the feeling John didn’t want to associate with him because Paul was a bit younger than him, but John “had to sort of admit there was, well, a little bit of talent there.”
That’s why John had band member Pete Shotton ask Paul to join The Quarry Men.
John didn’t directly ask Paul to join The Quarry Men
Despite getting iffy vibes from John, Paul called his first meeting with John a pivotal moment. Then, Shotton asked Paul to join The Quarry Men, and everything changed. Paul later realized that it was typical of John not to ask him himself.
“That was a very John thing to do – have someone else ask me so he wouldn’t lose face if I said no,” Paul wrote. “John often had his guard up, but that was one of the great balances between us. He could be quite caustic and witty, but once you got to know him, he had this lovely warm character. I was more the opposite: pretty easy-going and friendly, but I could be tough when needed.”
Whether John asked him personally or not, Paul would’ve taken his time considering joining the skiffle group. He wanted to weigh up his options and didn’t want to jump into anything hastily.
In The Lyrics, Paul wrote, “I wasn’t exactly playing hard to get. But I was a careful young fellow. I wondered whether I really wanted to be in a band. Was this a good thing, or should I be trying to study for school?”
Paul decided to join The Quarry Men after thinking about it thoroughly for about a week. “I decided, yeah, we could do something with this band,” Paul said. Considering Paul’s first feelings about John, the pair became inseparable, living inside each other’s pockets and writing songs.
