Today John’s singing with his band, the Quarry Men, at the St. Pete’s Church fete, and fifteen-year-old Paul and Ivy have bicycled over to check them out. Well, Ivy’s interested—Paul wants to check out the girls.

It’s Saturday, July 6, 1957, and already hot when the Quarry Men take the outside stage.

John’s wearing a “shortie”—a knee-length coat—over a checkered red-and-white shirt and black drainpipe jeans. He starts to cover the Del-Vikings’ doo-wop tune “Come Go with Me.” Paul has heard the American song only a handful of times, on the Decca Records show on Radio Luxembourg and playing in one of the record-shop booths.

Paul half listens and goes back to scouting the crowd. He’s thinking about which girl to approach first when he hears John change the lyrics without skipping a beat. Paul knows a lot about the guitar, and he can’t figure out what style John is playing as he breaks into a rockabilly cover of Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” John dominates the stage. Owns it.

Which isn’t much of a surprise. Everyone knows John Lennon is cocky and confident—and a local Ted, or Teddy Boy. Here in Liverpool, the Teds, with their long sideburns and oiled-up hair swept together in the back like a duck’s arse, are hard, rebellious working-class men and boys who love getting into fights.

Paul follows Ivy inside the St. Peter’s church hall, where the band’s setting up to play another set. John is widely considered a hoodlum. He lives with his aunt instead of his mum. The talk around town is that John’s father abandoned him, and now John’s mum lives in sin with another man. They had two daughters out of wedlock.

The memory of Paul’s own mother suddenly crowds his thoughts.

This past October, on the twenty-ninth, Mary McCartney went into the hospital. She didn’t tell him or his brother, Mike, why. Then, two days later, on Halloween, she died—from breast cancer, Paul found out eventually. Eight months have passed, and the loss still pierces him.

And that’s when he became consumed by music. As his brother puts it, “You lose a mother—and you find a guitar?”

If you can sing or play an instrument, Paul, you’ll always be invited to the party, his dad, Jim, a jazz musician in his youth, tells him. Paul starts on the trumpet, but after hearing Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegan, the so-called King of Skiffle, he takes the horn back to the Rushworth and Dreaper music shop and swaps it for a Zenith guitar.

The problem is he’s left-handed, and guitars are made for right-handers. So he’s learned to play the guitar in reverse—right hand working the fret board, shaping the chords, while strumming with his left.