John doesn’t care that Paul is only fifteen. Musically, he’s as serious as John is about rock ‘n’ roll. Paul’s already composing songs and knows how to play the piano.

And he plays the guitar perfectly—upside down.

Should I ask Paul to join the band? What if he tries to take over? John ponders these questions as he stands on the cobblestones outside the Cavern Club, in central Liverpool, where the Quarry Men played their first gig. The club, located under a fruit and vegetable warehouse, is a well-known jazz venue. “We never get auditions because of the jazz bands,” John says, but now jazz is on the way out, replaced by skiffle, a British version of jug-band music that the Quarry Men play.

But John’s true love is American rock ‘n’ roll, and tonight he wants nothing more than to get onstage and bend the crowd’s ears back with its raw rhythms. Except the Cavern Club doesn’t allow that type of music. No place does.

Rock ‘n’ roll has had a bad reputation ever since the American film Rock Around the Clock came to Britain last year and waves of teenagers ripped up their cinema seats so they could dance to the title track, by Bill Haley and His Comets. Now the old guard is terrified of the music’s destructive power. The BBC won’t play it on radio or TV.

But rock ‘n’ roll isn’t going away. Until just recently, the number-one song in the country was Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up.” John first heard about Elvis from a schoolmate quoting a music magazine. New Musical Express featured this strangely named American singer who had women screaming and fainting when he sang “Heartbreak Hotel” and thrust his hips onstage.

John bought the record and rushed home with it. He lives with his aunt, Mimi Smith, not his mum, Mimi’s sister Julia. At night, John gets underneath the bedcovers with his portable radio and turns the volume down low to listen to medium-wave Radio Luxembourg, which plays all the American rock ‘n’ roll hits.

Mimi does not approve of rock ‘n’ roll. She thinks people who listen to it are “low class” and wants him to stay focused on his schoolwork. Mimi doesn’t know that he’s formed a band, let alone that he has a gig tonight.

“A guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never earn a living by it.”

But John’s sure she’s wrong. “I wanted to write Alice in Wonderland and be Elvis Presley,” he says, and as far as he’s concerned, he can—and will—do both. A few days ago, he’d discovered that Mimi had yet again “cleaned” his room, tossing out all his drawings and poems. He was furious and didn’t hold back: You’ve thrown my fuckin’ poetry out, and you’ll regret it when I’m famous.

John wonders what Mimi’s reaction would be if she found out that the source of his forbidden Ted clothes is Julia, who loves Elvis just as much as he does. Julia, unlike puritan Mimi, has a record player and loves to sing and dance and toss about her gingery hair. She even bought him his first guitar, an acoustic Spanish flamenco-style model with steel strings that have cut painful grooves into his fingertips from his constant practicing.

By the time John meets up with his mates at the Cavern Club that evening, he’s come to a decision about Paul McCartney. “It went through my head that I’d have to keep him in line,” John later reveals. “But he was worth having.” John seeks out a mutual friend, Pete Shotton, to extend the invitation.

A four-string guitar strapped around his shoulder, John stares out at the middle-aged audience. God, they look stiff. He turns to the band and cues them.

Rod Davis, the banjo player, sidles up next to him, frantic. “You can’t do that,” he says. “They’ll eat you alive if you start playing rock ‘n’ roll in the Cavern!”

John ignores him and turns back to the crowd.

Let’s give ’em a taste of the King.

John belts out Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel.” The Quarry Men follow.

The manager hears the chorus—Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true—and rushes to the stage with a note.

Cut out the bloody rock ‘n’ roll.

John tosses the note aside and channels Jerry Lee Lewis and his new favorite, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, as he tears into another rock ‘n’ roll number from the American pop charts.

John invites Paul to play a gig with the Quarry Men at New Clubmoor Hall in Norris Green, the northern part of Liverpool—a good distance by bus from where they all live.

They open with “Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith and His Cracker-Jacks. The guitar solo is easy to play, a simple twelve-bar. But not only is this Paul’s first time playing with the band, it’s also his first guitar solo ever.

Onstage, John and Paul take turns singing. When one leads, the other harmonizes. John’s strength is holding the lower key; Paul’s voice is more suited for the higher range.

Paul starts his guitar solo.

His fingers won’t move. It’s like they’re stuck to the fret board.

Paul fights his way through it until his round face is flushed. Wet.

After the show, everyone is looking at him, and he’s frightened. Yet he’s resolute on one point. “It wiped me out as a lead guitar player, that night,” Paul says. “I never played lead again onstage.”

John is in his bedroom, composing a poem on his portable typewriter, when he hears a knock on the back door, off the kitchen.

Mimi calls up the stairs: “John, your little friend’s here.”

She uses this patronizing tone with all his friends. “I thought John and Mimi had a very special relationship,” Paul later says. “She would always be making fun of him and he never took it badly; he was always very fond of her, and she of him.” Even though she “would take the mickey,” Paul says, “I never minded it, in fact I think she quite liked me—out of a put-down I could glean the knowledge that she liked me.”

Mimi thinks Paul is the one “taking the mickey out” of her with his posh accent. “I thought, ‘He’s a snake charmer all right,’ John’s little friend, Mr. Charming. I wasn’t falling for it.”

John enters the kitchen and finds Paul McCartney standing there, Mimi eyeing the guitar in Paul’s hand and reminding them both to keep the noise down and not bother her student lodgers.

The University of Liverpool students Mimi takes in to supplement her widow’s state pension don’t interest John, though he’s also earned a place at the Liverpool College of Art after a portfolio review of his cartoons and caricatures. Maybe I can get a job drawing gorgeous girls for toothpaste posters is his thought.

“We’ve got this song, Mimi, do you want to hear it?” John asks his aunt.

“Certainly not,” Mimi scoffs. “Front porch, John Lennon, front porch.”

John closes the door, telling Paul that he likes it out on the porch “as the echo of the guitars bounce[s] nicely off the glass and the tiles.”

The moment Mimi leaves the house, they race upstairs and play Little Richard records. They both worship the singer from Macon, Georgia, and Paul can even mimic those trademark hollers and screams on “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally.”

But Elvis Presley is God, and they are his acolytes. They don’t just play Elvis records—they also analyze them, trying to figure out the chord progressions, every single sound. All the rock songs they know are played with C, F, and G or G⁷. They’re determined to crack the chords to Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” but it’s not until early winter that they discover that C, A minor, F, and G are the exact same chords Paul Anka used in his hit “Diana,” recorded in 1957, when he was fifteen, the same age as Paul.

John’s excitement is so fierce, so intense, that it’s nearly blinding. It confirms what he’s known all along: music is the reason he was put on this earth.

And he’s going to do music with Paul McCartney.