#TheBeatles #Quarrymen #WooltonVillageFete #johnlennon
This is the earliest recorded material of John Lennon. What you're hearing now is what a young James Paul McCartney heard when he went to watch The Quarrymen for the first time.
The tape was recorded on a portable Grundig TK8 by Bob Molyneux, a member of the church's youth club who is now a retired policeman.
In 1963, he offered the tape to Lennon, through Ringo Starr. But Lennon never responded, so Mr. Molyneux put the tape in a vault. When he offered it to Sotheby's in May 1994, the auction house asked Mark Lewisohn, a Beatles expert who wrote about the performance in "The Complete Beatles Chronicle," to listen to the recording.
"As soon as I heard the tape it was quite clear that it was John Lennon," Mr. Lewisohn said yesterday. "He was 16 years old, but it was that same distinctive voice. To suddenly come across a tape of an unknown band of teen-age musicians playing in a small town 37 years after the fact is almost unbelievable. It is a holy grail that no one knew existed."
The Quarry Men performed twice that day, outside the church in the afternoon and in the church hall in the evening. Mr. Molyneux recorded the evening performance. Between the two sets, Lennon was introduced to Mr. McCartney, then 15, who tuned Lennon's guitar, something the older musician had not yet mastered. Mr. McCartney was invited to join the Quarry Men two weeks later. The other members were Eric Griffiths on guitar, Pete Shotton on washboard, Len Garry on bass and Rod Davis on banjo. Colin Hanton, the drummer, did not perform in the evening set.
On the tape, Lennon sings "Puttin' on the Style," a No. 1 hit at the time for Lonnie Donegan, and "Baby Let's Play House," an Arthur Gunter song that Lennon knew from an Elvis Presley recording. Lennon used a line from the Gunter song -- "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man" -- as the opening line of his own "Run for Your Life" in 1965.
"When you first hear the tape," said Stephen Maycock, the expert in charge of rock-and-roll sales at Sotheby's, "it sounds rough. It was recorded with a hand-held microphone in the worst venue you could want, a church hall with a high ceiling and probably a hard floor. Despite that, it has been stored carefully, and the sound has probably not deteriorated from what it was in 1957.