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dealt with gracefully, sometimes with humor and sarcasm. But he also made it clear to teachers and friends that he was very interested in music and art.
    Quarry Bank’s headmaster, William Pobjoy, knew that despite his questionable grades at times, John was very smart. In an act that caused some of the teachers to question his own credibility, Pobjoy helped John to get into the Art Institute (now John Moores University), where his relations with intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals would make him even more of a young revolutionary. Although he would meet future wife Cynthia there, along with great friends Bill Harry and Stu Sutcliffe, John’s grades were dismal. Some years later, John answered a fan letter from a student at Quarry Bank. In reference to the headmaster who indirectly paved the way to advance John’s destiny, John wrote, “After all, it was he who got me into art school, so I could fail there, too, and I can never thank him enough.”
    There is plenty of confirmation of John’s indifference to the standard rules of education. June Furlong, our heroine who once braved German bombings in total darkness, became a successful life model and worked at the Art Institute. Sitting in the coffee shop of a modern Liverpool movie house, June smiles broadly as she tells me that John’s close friend Stu Sutcliffe was engaged in the learning process, while John seemed less so.
    â€œStuart was the student. John was the inquisitor and activist, more involved with the other students, a little bit distracted, but I must add, the perfect gentleman at the same time.”
    So we know that John as a student, at both his middle and high school, was highly suspect. The only time he seemed to meld at Quarry Bank was when he talked music, and subsequently formed his very basic skiffle band, the Quarrymen, affectionately named after the school he had so warmly accepted as his own in more ways than one. And it is in that pursuit, the desire to play his heart out for anyone who listened, that John Lennon, in his early teens, found his obsession, influenced by his birth mother along with a spark from good friends.
    Colin Hanton remembers the traits of character that the confused but driven teenage John brought to the band.
    â€œHe was a leader but he didn’t bang the table and say, ‘I am the boss.’ Whatever he wanted to sing, there was no point arguing. We just went along with it. He led gently, so to speak. Where John went, we followed. He wasn’t a tyrant or anything, most of the time.”
    Was he fun to play with?
    â€œOh yeah. He was a great laugh. There was no middle ground with him. If he liked you, he liked you. If not, then he wasn’t going to be funny about it. I must add, too, that he was rarely afraid of trouble.”
    And trouble was always just around the corner.
Johnny’s Great Escape: First Rush
    Trouble did come in one of the Quarrymen’s early concerts. It was an important event because it showed young John that he had a power, in addition to the music, that would carry over to the days of the Beatles. It was, in a word, seduction. Some men and women develop the art of seduction as life goes on. John had it at an early age, and he broadcast what he was looking for with his eyes, his hips, and his voice, sometimes high but always entrancing.
    June 22, 1957, was a day to remember, or forget, depending on whom you were. If you were John Lennon, it would be an early lesson in the perils of sexual animal magnetism—aka John Lennon putting girls in heat.
    Rosebery Street was putting on a bit of a street festival, part of a citywide celebration of neighborhoods. The Quarrymen were booked, and set up their instruments on the back of a lorry. In American terms, that would be a flatbed trailer behind a truck—not very glamorous, but they were fifteen years old.
    Dealing with nerves was never part of John Lennon’s preshow routine—not until he downed