Not many people can claim they were replaced in a band by Paul McCartney and played with John Lennon, but Rod Davis can.
Davis met the nucleus of the Quarrymen (who would eventually morph into the Beatles) — Pete Shotton, Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan and Geoff Rhind and Lennon while at St. Peter’s Sunday School.
“ I actually knew John when I was five or six years old because we were in the same class at Sunday school, which doesn’t do a lot for his image. And various other people were in the same little class,” said Davis who is opening for New York bluesman Guy Davis on a three week North American tour including several Canadian dates, including two at the Geomatic Attic, Nov. 24-25. Both shows begin at 8 p.m. Tickets, which cost $35 in advance, $40 afterward can be obtained by e-mailing Mike Spencer at
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. It’s actually due to the original Quarrymen reuniting that Rod Davis is touring with Guy Davis. The two Davis’ met through Guy Davis’ manager, who ran into one of the Quarrymen and brought them over to the United States to tour. Guy and Rod hit it off so when Guy toured England he kept in touch.
“He knows I enjoy a lot of blues and Guy stayed with me a couple times, so we’d do a lot of back porch picking and we got on very well indeed. I did a short spot for one of his gigs in New York and it went over very well, so he said why don’t you open for me on this tour of Canada, so here I am,” Davis said adding he got into a lot of different music since leaving the original Quarrymen, especially traditional bluegrass and folk. Some of the band’s repertoire remains in their set list. They have been touring pretty regularly since reuniting in 1997 with the original line up other than Lennon. They reunited at the fortieth anniversary of the Cavern, where the Quarrymen and lots of other bands got their start.
“I didn’t know John terribly well until I went to school at the 11ths, a secondary school at 11, because John lived on the other end of the hill and I had plenty of opportunity to get up to mischief on my side of the hill without going over to his side, so it wasn’t until we went to Quarry Banks school, which is of course where the name the Quarrymen came from, that I got to know him better,” Davis continued adding like many British youth in the mid ’50s, he was inspired by popular skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan’s version of an old Leadbelly song, “Rock Island Line” to pick up an instrument. In his case, the banjo.
“They were actually difficult to get hold of because they were in such demand — banjos and guitars. I turned up on the Monday morning and there was my friend Eric Griffiths … I told him ‘I reckoned I got a banjo yesterday.’ He asked if I wanted to be in a group. I mean he knew I couldn’t play it because I just admitted I bought it the day before and I asked if who else was in the group. He said Shelton on the washboard, Bill Smith on tea chest bass, me on guitar, and John Lennon on guitar. So I said ‘ oh yeah that sounds good’ so fine I was in. They were only three chords ahead of me so I soon caught up an there we were and that’s how I joined the Quarrymen,” Davis continued, adding he is only bringing a guitar for this tour, though he may borrow a banjo from Guy Davis. Rod Davis will be opening the shows with a half hour set then join Guy after his set for a couple numbers together.
Davis played with the Quarrymen during all of the members’ fifth year of school before they parted ways. But he has fond memories of John Lennon, though he didn’t really recognize the budding talent in the 15-year old Lennon.
“The rest of us didn’t have any microphones. Because they were like hen’s teeth. But his big talent really which was evident at the time was his caricatures. He was brilliant at drawing caricatures of anybody, himself, schoolteachers. There’s no question he could have made a very good career as a very good, very wicked and very cruel caricaturist if he tried. He was good in front of a band but that was the really obvious talent, no question,” he said adding he also didn’t remember Lennon writing songs at that early age.
“I believe he had but that wasn’t the sort of thing you admitted to your friends. We had a school magazine which came out every term, John wrote the odd weird poem that was published in the school magazine. I remember one called the The tale of Hermit Fred which appeared in one of them. The only signs I had of John writing things it was very difficult for us to get the words of songs because none of us had part time jobs. It wasn’t normal in those days England, so we didn’t have much money, so we couldn’t go out buying lots of records and even sheet music wasn’t cheap, so you’d sit by the radio, usually Radio Luxembourg, with a pen and paper and try to scribble the words down. And of course you might wait the whole evening and still have gaps. So John would the gaps in. That was the first songwriting I knew he did— filling the gaps of songs. And eventually, sometimes we’d get the right words, other times we’d just continue doing the wrong words because that’s just the way it was,” he said, adding Lennon was an interesting character as a young man.
“I think he discovered fairly early in life at the Quarry Banks School at age 11 that there was actually very little they could do to him. I mean they could cane him on one end and suspend him but other than that there was very little serious punishment they could give to him. So he realized he could get away with all kinds of things. So that’s what he tried to do,” he laughed.
“ I have been a teacher in my career for quite a few years among other things and he’s what you’d call today a disruptive pupil. He’d do anything for a laugh or a joke. And you know, disturb the peace of the class because obviously because it was a grammar school and in theory we were all supposed to be working hard with our noses to the grindstone. And that wasn’t something that John would really do. He wasn’t such a bad pupil as history seems to make out. If you read his school reports in a book called ‘the Lennon Legends.’ There are two of his transcripts. Some very nice things being said about him. But they all say he’s far to fond of getting a cheap laugh,” he continued.
“He was just far too fond of making people laugh and being the class clown. I was never in his class but I was in the same part of the school as he was and in the same year so I knew what was going on. He was a fun person to be around but he didn’t do the teaching standards any good. Let’s put it that way. He was actually known as ‘that Lennon’. My mother would say to me ‘stay away from that Lennon he’s a bad influence,’” Davis continued adding he had very little contact with Lennon after leaving the Quarrymen.
“I must have seen him a few times. But there was only one time I really remember. I was doing my second year of university. And I was at the other end of the country because I was at the University of Cambridge. And while I was there, I got involved with folk music and bluegrass music and I was home on holiday walking around Liverpool, and who did I bump into but John. He asked what are you playing these days, I told him I’ve been playing a lot of guitar, a bit of fiddle, a little mandolin, because I’m really into bluegrass music these days. He said ‘well if you can play drums, you can come and play with us in Hamburg.’ I can’t imagine it was a serious offer, but I had to tell him well A, I don’t play drums anyway and two, my mom would kill me if I left halfway through my degree course in Cambridge to go to Hamburg with ‘that Lennon.’ If I’d known what they were up to at the time, maybe I’d have been more inclined to go. That was the last time I saw him,” he continued adding he never really got to know Paul McCartney who replaced him in the Quarrymen, other than a brief visit during a Quarrymen rehearsal.
“ I didn’t know Paul at all, he replaced me in the band. Paul went to a different school. He was from the Liverpool Institutes. We used to allow our friends to come and hear us practice. One time we were practicing in John’s Aunt Mimi’s basement. In fact it was the only time I remember practicing at Aunt Mimi’s house. There was this young man there. And I said ‘Hey John, who’s this? He said this is Paul McCartney. He’s come to listen to us practice. So it would appear that they had met by then and had already made up their mind to ask Paul to join the band and he came on to practice. In fact that was probably the last time I played with the Quarrymen because a week later it was the end of the fifth year at school and all the guys had left. So I don’t really remember Paul at all,” the avid wind-surfer Davis continued, adding he met McCartney a few years later while waiting for the wind during a competition in Brighton, as some of the officials from the competition knew McCartney.
“We were sitting on the promenade in Brighton waiting for the wind to come up and a friend of mine said hey, there’s Paul McCarteny walking his dog. Because of course he had a house there, so I said this I’ve got to see. So I walked through the garden and sure enough there was a man with a hoodie and a large dog talking to a couple people a couple of officials from the even and they know me, so they said ‘hey Rod, look who it is.’ So I walked over and shook hands with him. And he said ‘Who are you then?’ I said ‘I’m the guy you replaced in the Quarrymen in 1957. And he said, ‘Good God, that’s going back a bit. What happened, did I elbow you aside?’ And I said, oh no I was a banjo player and you were becoming a rock and roll group and you can’t really have a banjo in a rock and roll group. And what I should have said and I didn’t think of it until later was ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s not like you’re going anywhere anyway.’ So anyway we chatted for a bit and the dog got restless and he went strolling along the promenade. So there you go it was a nice little meeting. He was very charming,” Davis recalled.
The Quarrymen still play regularly.
“We’ve been playing together for 12 years. Of the original guys who were there in 1957, we started off with everybody except for John himself. Then in 2000, Pete Shelton decided that he never got any musical satisfaction from playing the washboard and so he decided to retire, then in 2005, Eric Griffith suddenly died of pancreatic cancer, so there were three of us Colin Hanton, the drummer who played with John, Paul and George, Len Garry who was the bass player who is now our lead singer who played with John and Paul, and myself who only played with John and was replaced by Paul. We also have John Dothlow who was the piano player in 1958, a friend of Paul McCartney’s, Colin Hanton. We’ve got four Quarrymen from the mid-50s which isn’t bad going. We don’t play a lot of gigs. We played in England, on the Siberian border, Switzerland in Italy had expected to come to the American continent in October of this year which didn’t happen but last year we did a two week tour of the States. We get around. For old guys, we still get around,” he said.
— by Richard Amery, L.A. Beat Editor
