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.