‘Happiness is a Warm Gun in Your Hand’: The day John Lennon was dared to masturbate ten times in a row
The Beatles were sold to the world as the pop stars that you could take home to meet your parents. While the hair was a little long and the accents a little odd to American ears, John Lennon and chums were mostly harmless.
By the time they became the biggest band in the world, they were clad in suits, singing about wanting to hold your hand, and any more lascivious motives in their work had to be read into their music a lot closer than most parents were willing to get. Listen to ‘She Loves You’ enough times, and you can tell that the song’s narrator is so familiar with the girl in question’s feelings because he’s getting off with her himself.
This might sound like conjecture, but the truth is that the Fabs were all as laddish as any bunch of young guys from Liverpool before and after them. I mean, come on, this was a band that cut their teeth playing marathon, drug-fuelled live shows in the middle of the Hamburg red light district.
If legend’s to be believed, they didn’t just take part in the drugs on offer, either. Allegedly, George Harrison lost his virginity to a buxom German burlesque dancer as Pete Best, Paul McCartney and Lennon himself all watched on.
They might have wanted the press to believe they were choirboys, but none of that was true. Well, apart from John Lennon, he literally was one when he was a kid. Yet he was also arguably the most rough-hewn of the lot.
Lennon was a Jack-the-lad known all about Liverpool as a scallywag long before Johnny and the Moondogs were formed. It’s extremely funny that people think Lennon’s childhood consisted of stories like the one were his teacher asks his class to write what they want to be when they grew up on the blackboard, and he gets in trouble for writing “happy”.
However, the actual Lennon would have drawn a jizzing cock on the blackboard, soaked up the applause, then been excluded for a week. Again.
This is similar to a much, much more believable story that comes from one of Lennon’s childhood best friends, Pete Shotton. A man who was so close to the legendary Beatles singer that he was actually in an early version of the band, playing washboard when The Beatles were still a skiffle band called The Quarrymen.
As kids, Lennon and Shotton were such frequent visitors to their head teacher’s office. In John Lennon: In My Life, one of the (many) books Shotton wrote about their friendship, he told a story that showed just how unreconstructedly laddish Lennon really was.
On one summer’s day, presumably when Lennon was home suspended from school, Shotten dared his friend to masturbate ten times in a single day. Not one to turn down a challenge, Lennon gave it as good as he got.
According to Shotton, he made it to nine. Something that probably hung over the incredibly competitive Lennon for the rest of his days.