"To John’s further delight, he discovered Paul was corruptible. In no time he groomed his young cohort to shoplift cigarettes and candy as well as stimulating in him an appetite for pranks. On one occasion that still resonates for those involved, the Quarry Men went to a party in Ford, a village on the outskirts of Liverpool… “John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins,” says Charles Robert, who met them en route on the upper deck of a cherry red Ribble bus. “It was like the rest of us didn’t exist.” They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner, Roberts recalls. And it wasn’t just music on their agenda, it was mischief. “In the middle of the party they went out, ostensibly looking for a cigarette machine, and appeared some time after carrying a cocky-watchman’s lamp. The next morning, when it was time to leave, we couldn’t get out of the house because they had put cement stolen from the roadworks into the mortise lock so the front door wouldn’t open. And we had to escape through a window.”
(Source: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, 2005)
I just wanna know how you feel. Want a love that's so proud and real. You make me wanna go out and steal. I just want it fuh you, I just want it fuh you.
Well you can dress me up as a robber but I won't be in disguise. Only love is a robber and he lives within your eyes.
This was the John Lennon of larks and dares, scraps and scrapes, games and guffaws, everything for laughs. There was plenty of boyish cruelty, verbal more than physical (though John was never shy to use his fists), and it was great to be in his gang even when he forced you to steal. John was now petty-thieving whenever and wherever he could. He called it “slap leather,” and all the gang had to do it. Shops were fair game, toy cars or sweets slipped into pockets with shopkeepers none the wiser. If there was trouble, though, if a Lennon plan went awry, he had the knack of disappearing. The gang members would turn around and their leader would be gone.
—Tune In (Ch. 2; 1945-1954)
“John and I used to nick a lot. ‘We’ll have this bit from the Marvelettes, we’ll have that bit from …’ If you really nick then it’s a disaster, but [the way we did] it just gets you into the song, and in the end you never notice where it was nicked from. You pull it all together and it makes something original.”52
Some nicks are conjectural. “I saw her standing on the corner” is the opening line of the Coasters’ “Young Blood,” and “she’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen” is from Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie”—both songs still in the Beatles’ set. “How could I dance with another / Since I saw her standing there” has a similar melody and meter to “I want to be in that number / When the saints go marching in”—the tune Paul learned on trumpet in 1955–6 and the B-side of their own “My Bonnie” record. Other nicks are definite. In a 1964 interview, Paul cheerfully admitted to the wholesale lifting of the bass riff in Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You” that runs throughout “I Saw Her Standing There”: “I played exactly the same notes as he did and it fitted our number perfectly.”53
—Tune In (Ch. 35; Nov/Dec 1962)
