Baptism by Fire[I]
It was “pissing rain” on the evening of October 1, 1960, when Rory Storm and the Hurricanes arrived in Hamburg. A slashing downpour had chased their train all the way from the Dutch border, and by the time they arrived at Steintorplatz the city lay under a seizing mist.
Germany. Enemy territory. Only fifteen years earlier, England had been at war here, set on destroying this country and the evil it represented. Conflict and hatred had been so mingled in the Scouse psyche that in contemplating this godforsaken country, one imagined storm troopers, a twisted cross, and the treachery of poxy fräulein, with their alabaster skin and scornful, froggy eyes. And now here they were, incomprehensibly enough, poised to perform, to play music on streets where only fifteen years earlier brothers and fathers had died.
Germany. It looked exactly as they’d pictured it: stern, mournful, impenetrable. A cloud of premature darkness pressed down against the rooftops and ghosts of fog rose from the asphalt, erasing all vanishing points so that the few stragglers who hastened along the slick streets looked as though they melted into the unseen. There was a solitude that resonated in the shadows, with its fresh scars of siege and patches of hasty restoration. Buildings were knocked cockeyed, salvaged; new towers stood out of place among ancient rubbled structures. An uneasy stir emanated from the landscape.
The Hurricanes arrived at the Kaiserkeller about 6:30 and piled out of three taxis, along with all their equipment. The street was deserted, eerie; the club shuttered and dark. The cool air drawing tight around them, they just stood there helplessly, watching the equipment get soaked. Johnny Byrne, the band’s guitarist, recalls confronting Rory Storm, who seemed bemused by the predicament. “Now what are we going to do?” he asked.
Before Storm could answer, a faint rumble of music came drifting up the street. It was off in the distance, not more than a block or two away, but instantly recognizable: “Roll Over Beethoven.” “God, that’s strange!” Storm murmured.
Strange, indeed. There was nothing within proximity to indicate a connection to rock ’n roll. No club was open, no church hall in sight. Clumsily, they gathered up the gear and headed toward the music.
A block down the street they stopped in front of a building at 58 Grosse Freiheit that looked “like a funeral parlor.” THE INDRA, a sign announced over the front door. Inside, the music rumbled away. A rush came over them—“a great rush,” Byrne remembers. “Someone was giving this tune a fantastic workout.”
The Indra was a strip joint, nothing more than a “small and tatty” lounge with red flock wallpaper and heavy drapes. There wasn’t a soul inside, other than the band that was rehearsing explosively at the back. “We couldn’t believe our eyes—or our ears,” Byrne recalls. “The sound that was coming from these guys was fantastic, it was raw and exciting, just plain rocking out, and as tight as I’d heard a band play. There was something about the way they looked, too—rough, and intense, and a little bit rebellious. Not anything like we remembered them from Liverpool. Once we realized who it was, Rory and I turned to each other with this shocked look on our faces and we both kind of blurted out: ‘It’s the Beatles!’”
When Allan Williams endeavored to send another band to Hamburg in August 1960, the Beatles were probably the last group on his mind. According to several acquaintances, he offered the gig to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, but they were adamant about finishing an engagement at Butlins Holiday Camp in Pwllheli, Wales, which ran through the summer, into September. He also got the brush-off from Gerry and the Pacemakers, who refused to quit steady day jobs for work that was short-term at best. “Allan was having plenty of trouble finding a band,” says Bill Harry, “and that’s how the Beatles got involved. They were really in no condition to perform”—Williams himself considered them “sort of a crappy group”—“but they courted Allan, and Stuart came on strong.”
Strong—and somewhat vengeful. A few weeks earlier, Williams had participated in an intrigue whose outcome eventually cost Stuart his flat. According to roommate Rod Murray, Williams had encountered them one afternoon at Ye Cracke, trailing an entourage he introduced as “reporters from the Empire News.” They were in Liverpool, he explained, to do a survey on student grants, trying to discern how students lived and survived on such meager allowances. Oh-ho! That was all the boys needed to hear. Everyone had a hard-luck story he loved to tell. Stuart described how, when money ran out, they burned pieces of furniture to stay warm. Another friend, Rod Jones, complained that on weekends, he bummed meals off his relatives. Each story got better—and more outrageous—as the drinks flowed. Eventually one of the reporters said, “Come on, let’s go have a look at your flat. We’ll bring a couple bottles of whiskey and some beer.”
On first glimpse, Gambier Terrace wasn’t the hole the press expected, but by the time they got done with it, Charles Dickens would have been aghast. “They got newspapers,” Bill Harry says, “crumpled them up, threw them about haphazardly. Strew empty beer bottles everywhere. Made it look a dirty mess.” Stuart posed boldly in the forefront (along with John and Allan Williams) as photographers snapped away.
In fact, the reporters weren’t from the Empire News, considered a “respectable paper” by local standards, but the scandalmongering Sunday People, which gave the piece a proper front-page bashing. Worse, perhaps, was the headline—THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR—warning that “most beatniks like dirt… [and] dress in filthy clothes” and bemoaning the conditions of “the decaying Gambier Terrace.” That latter tidbit especially caught the attention of the building’s residents association, which wasted no time in having the students evicted.
John and Stuart were livid. Williams had used them in order “to suck up to the press,” and now Stuart was calling in a chit. He demanded more consideration from Williams in booking the band, specifically when it came to Hamburg. Though he remained unconvinced of the Beatles’ artistic ability—“I wasn’t altogether happy about their stagecraft,” he wrote rather unctuously—Williams agreed to book them overseas, provided, of course, that they find a competent drummer. Williams no doubt figured that bought him precious time; in all likelihood, they’d be unable to satisfy that condition for the Hamburg gig, by which point he’d have found a more qualified band.
Now fate intervened. With their Wirral residency prematurely ended and nowhere else to play, the band bumped around town, scouting the competition. One of their stops was the Casbah, from which they had unceremoniously stomped off six months earlier. Mo greeted them warmly at the door, casting an especially heartfelt smile at George, who had remained in touch, occasionally stopping by the club with his brother Peter.
Inside, the Blackjacks were playing at one end of the complex. Sitting behind the drums was Mo’s son Pete Best. As far as they could tell, he was consistent, a “real pounding rock ’n roll drummer” who lashed his foot to the bass and, in a sober, mathematical manner, spanked out four beats to the bar—which drummers call “playing fours”—instead of the usual two, which gave off “a powerful effect.” He seemed to know most of the standards; his movement had a certain nice economy to it. He owned an impressive new kit and it probably also didn’t hurt that he looked good. A pale, stiff boy with a dusty mop of hair, eyelids all but shuttered, and a languid, adolescent smile carved from a lower lip that was saucily retracted, girls were drawn to him in a visceral way. Later, observers labeled him “moody,” but there was nothing in his personality that marked him as remotely temperamental. Rather, Pete seemed adrift and forlorn in a milieu of small-time characters and egotists—quiet, perhaps fortified to the point of indifference, dispassionate maybe, but not moody.
There are several versions of what happened next. Best told one interviewer that an offer to join the Beatles came through his mother, who pushed him toward the group. He later amended the account, saying that Paul called, dangling a job opportunity in Hamburg that would pay £15 a week. In neither version did he hesitate to accept. “I’d always liked them very much,” he allowed of the Beatles. Shunning a spot at the teachers training college, he said, “I decided [instead] to persevere with the music.”
John, meanwhile, had to come up with something good enough to divert Aunt Mimi’s attention from a more damning piece of news. It had recently come to his attention that he would not be welcomed back to art college in the fall. Too much messy baggage had accumulated on his record, and it all finally piled up on him. “He was absent too much,” says Helen Anderson. “He never produced any work. The tutors blamed him, in general, for misbehaving, disrupting classes, making trouble, and telling people to bugger off. And they eventually got fed up with it.”
If Mimi found out, he’d never hear the end of it. Furthermore, it would mean having to get a job, which was anathema to John; he’d never worked a day in his life, aside from playing music for a few bob here and there. Rather than risk all that, he presented Hamburg to Mimi with inflated fringe benefits, claiming he’d earn £100 a week. A hundred pounds! It was an extraordinary figure in a country whose average weekly wage was almost half that figure, and it should have tipped her off to the bluff. Much later, Mimi told Lennon biographer Ray Coleman that she “feared the worst,” which may have meant that she suspected the story all along; but even if she had, there was nothing she could do to keep John from going. He was nineteen, of legal age and well outside his aunt’s grasp.
Paul’s strategy was—like Paul—more subtle and cunning. A promising if erratic student, he had another term left at the Liverpool Institute and a father for whom education was the one sure route to social betterment. For the most part, Paul had cooperated; he’d even sat his A levels in June and was awaiting the results.* But music was biting into those plans. Over Jim’s objections, Paul devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to the band. “I didn’t want to go back to school, or college,” Paul later told Hunter Davies. Yet he knew that Jim would not tolerate idleness.
The only way around that was, of course, convincing Jim that there was opportunity in Hamburg. First, brother Mike would be needed to help promote the cause. Mike, Paul knew, would be able to soften up his father in an unassuming way. In exchange for this support, Paul promised to “buy… lots of things” for Mike, who worshipped his elder brother and would have done anything to help him, even without bribery. Jim was moved by his sons’ eloquence, not to mention Paul’s fiery intensity, and no doubt drew a parallel to his own dashed musical ambitions. Paul invited Allan Williams to the house to further plead his case. One can only imagine how Williams described Hamburg to Jim, but it can be assumed with some confidence that the promoter laid it on thick. He assured Jim that there would be no problems, that Bruno Koschmider would look after them. Somehow, Jim took his word that it would be a good place for the boys to play, and before the get-together was over Jim had given his consent.
Williams also went to bat for Stuart Sutcliffe, whose parents (incredibly) considered Williams a role model for Liverpool boys, “a respectable and kind person” just enterprising enough to combine art and commerce in a viably successful manner. Stuart, they reasoned, would do well to follow that formula. Even so, they were still fuming from the Johnny Gentle tour. Not only did they have to send Stuart money so he could get home from Scotland, but the tour had interrupted—and almost thwarted—his submission for the National Diploma in Design. As a result, Williams’s sales pitch became more delicate—and somewhat misleading. “Allan didn’t entirely tell [our parents] the whole truth about going to Hamburg,” Pauline Sutcliffe recalled. “It was presented… as an interesting venture. It would be a good experience for [Stuart], being abroad and traveling. It was very much dressed up as an interlude in his life” as opposed to a job, which they never would have permitted.
Eventually, Millie Sutcliffe relented. She was never very good at denying Stuart anything he wanted, and with the Harrisons’ and the Bests’ approval—both families were enthusiastic from the start—the deal was sealed.
Very quickly thereafter, the gears began to crank. Birth certificates were produced, along with passports and visas; bags and equipment were packed and properly labeled for transit. It all came together with remarkable speed. Four days later, on August 16, 1960, the Beatles left for Hamburg.
[II]
The Beatles had been out of England before—to Scotland, which they considered a pleasant enough place. But Hamburg was a different world altogether. Maybe even a different planet. The city itself was as familiar as their own modest backyards. A port with a thriving shipping trade conducted under a blanket of perpetual fog, it not only looked, felt, and smelled like Liverpool, the cafés even served a “typical” dish of gruel called labskaus that stood up to their brackish minced-meat stew. The sooty streets were narrow and mazy, studded with ancient crumbling cobblestones, and ran between the pitted redbrick facades of surviving neo-Gothic warehouses whose musky scents defied all insulation. The marine stench of the waterfront mingled with tangy notes of coffee, tea, tobacco, spices, even the sharp chemical trail of petroleum, and smelled much like Bootle or Garston.
They’d arrived at dusk, driving through the Mönckebergstrasse, whose wide tree-lined sidewalks were crowded with well-dressed pedestrians on their way home from work. On either side of their van, observed in dizzying perspective, the scene was surpassingly normal: couples dawdled at cafés, spun in and out of stores, stopped to peer in windows featuring lavish end-of-season sales. The Alster lakes, a glinting aqueduct speckled with rowboats and swans, shared a ledgy rise with an office complex that bisected the center of town. They passed the Rathaus, dark and ominous, where the Senate and city Parliament convened; the market square; and St. Michael’s Church.
All perfectly normal, until Allan Williams swung the van around a concrete divider and into the corridors of the St. Pauli district, where they would be working.
Alas, Babylon! If ever a stage designer tried to create a set for depravity, this was it. St. Pauli rushed in on them from every direction. It resembled a carnival midway, only gaudier and more vulgar. The action was shoulder to shoulder, back-to-back: bars, nightclubs, cafés, luncheonettes, clip joints, arcades, dance halls, saloons. And lights—miles of lights—blazed with such dizzying, high-toned intensity that colors simply melted into one another. Slender girls, nude but for cowboy boots, blinked in neon above open doors. Floodlights lit the sky and arc lamps, suspended on poles, washed the street in a sublunar light that made all cars cruising by appear purple. Indifferent to time, the night seemed pushed back a few blocks. Here it was bright around the clock, a daylight for vampires.
Allan Williams knew what to expect, but he hadn’t prepared the boys. Nor had he told them about the district’s overriding theme, which wasn’t music but sex. Its two main streets—the Grosse Freiheit and the Herbertstrasse—formed the city’s infamous “mile of sin,” and it was there, along with the intersecting Reeperbahn, that men flocked to behave as they might at a Roman orgy. “It was an ‘anything goes’ kind of place,” says Adrian Barber, who turned up there later, as a member of the Big Three, but stayed to work for nearly a decade. There existed an ethos of hedonism that stretched back to the Middle Ages, when Hamburg was a member of the Hanseatic League, a free port, and therefore an essentially lawless haven—“kind of a Dodge City of the open seas,” says Barber—where bad behavior was overlooked by the local authorities. Throughout history, the tradition was preserved as a foil to the rigid German culture, which was built around regimentation and power.
The place looked just right to the Beatles, who could hardly believe their eyes. It was all out there in front of them: girls prowling the streets, sitting provocatively in brothel picture windows, leaning just so against cars; music blaring from every open doorway; drunken sailors stumbling along the sidewalk, lofting steins of beer.
“That’s the club!” Williams shouted, pulling to the curb outside a squat building on the Grosse Freiheit.
The Kaiserkeller, on the corner of Schmuckstrasse, was everything they imagined it would be. The club was bigger, brighter, louder, and groovier than anything they had seen before. Its decor alone left them practically speechless: a long boat-shaped bar, fishing nets stretched tautly on the ceilings, banquettes built to resemble a ship’s galley, with portholes sunk into the walls and shiny brass fixtures salvaged from the port. The sweet smell of beer filled the room like a perfumed boudoir. The Kaiserkeller was posh compared with the saltcellars in Liverpool, and wired for rock ’n roll. The sound system was first-rate. And four microphones had been placed at intervals across the small stage, where Derry and the Seniors rocked the house.
Bruno Koschmider must have detected their excitement. Even so, he barely paused long enough to hear their praise before rushing them off to another club several hundred yards down the street, where the Beatles were scheduled to play.
The Indra “was depressing” by comparison. “We were crestfallen when we saw [it],” said Pete Best. It was a lounge—a girlie lounge—and deader than dead. A few bleary-eyed tourists sat glumly sipping beers. Along one side of the small rectangular room stood five spare banquettes, all empty, as were four of the six tables placed strategically on the floor. The heavy, worn red curtains and carpeting made the place seem even more shabby than it already appeared.
There was hope. It was explained through an interpreter that Kosch-mider planned to turn the Indra into a balls-out rock ’n roll club, optimally another Kaiserkeller. All the place needed was a hot British band to generate a buzz, and the owner had been assured that the Beatles were up to the job.
But the Beatles were as stiff as the punters who trickled into the club. Accustomed to playing a few songs to a houseful of teenagers, they were oblivious to the demands of a difficult crowd. They had no act to speak of, knew almost nothing of stagecraft, and as musicians they weren’t terribly engaging. Stuart still struggled woefully to follow the melody lines, on top of which, they’d had no time to work Pete into the band. By contract, the Beatles were required to play a staggering four and a half hours each night, six hours on the weekend. “You can’t imagine the work that took,” says Ray Ennis, who showed up in Hamburg sometime later, with the Swinging Blue Jeans. (They had modernized the spelling of their name beginning with this gig.) “All the Liverpool bands were used to playing twenty-minute sets back home. Suddenly we had to go all night. That meant coming up with the material, not to mention the stamina.”
The Beatles had material. John, Paul, and George were a walking encyclopedia of rock ’n roll songs, to say nothing of the skiffle tunes and pub standards still shuffled into their act. If necessary, they could put together an hour of material without repeating a song. But somehow it didn’t click with the crowd. People would poke their heads inside the Indra doorway to check out the scene, then do a quick about-face. Certainly some blame could be laid to the place itself, which wasn’t exactly inviting. But as far as creating excitement went, the Beatles weren’t cutting it.
Angrily, Koschmider contacted Allan Williams and expressed his dissatisfaction. Hastily, Williams raced to Hamburg to size up the situation and run some interference. Much to his chagrin, he found Koschmider’s objections justified. The Beatles were performing at the Indra in an unexceptional manner. Their sets “were… far too deadpan,” he surmised; they just “stood still and strummed.” This was a bigger problem than it had seemed. Williams had a good thing going with Koschmider. He didn’t want a group like the Beatles to louse up the arrangement.
According to Williams, he gave “the boys a really rough lecture” and followed up with another visit to gauge its effect. Exasperated, he found it hadn’t made the slightest impression. They were playing “almost motionless [sic],” scarcely even trying to complement the inescapable beat. It baffled him. How could they churn out manic rockers like “Roll Over Beethoven” or “Good Golly, Miss Molly” without giving it any oomph? In his interpretive study, Tell Me Why, Tim Riley nails it when he calls rock ’n roll “the sexiest music of all—it makes you want to move.” Even Williams, who had no love for the form, felt its physical tug. “C’mon, boys,” he exhorted them, “make a show.”
Make a show.
It was like something a teacher might say before the start of school speech day or the class play. Make a show: it sounded completely inappropriate for rock ’n roll. John couldn’t stop snickering. He lurched around the stage in mock-theatrics, diving toward the mike and duck-walking like Chuck Berry or dropping into a split. Williams, who didn’t realize John was taking the mickey out of him, cheered on the antics. “That’s it! Make a show! Make a show!”
Koschmider, too, took up the chant, barking at the band in a kind of quasi-militaristic chant: “Mach Schau! Mach Schau!”
The Beatles thought that was a scream. A German shouting, “Mach Schau!” To them it sounded like the Goons doing a hilarious take on the Nazis—the shrill accent, the jerky hand motion, the bugged-out eyes. However frivolous, it did the trick. They had finally found the stimulus that freed their inhibitions. “Mach Schau!” The entire band got into the act, imitating John’s happy horseplay. Paul raised his guitar, as though fencing with John, repeating this gesture until his partner responded. He made pass after pass, speeding up, slowing down. In no time, George chimed in, stamping and scrabbling his feet like a demented Cossack. Stuart, though saddled with the bass, contorted his body as though he were dodging bullets. A cyclone of rhythmic unrest swept across the Indra’s stage, synced to Pete’s ferocious beat.
It was the breakthrough the band had needed, and immediately they began to work these outbursts into the act. Songs were suddenly larded with physical surges and thrusts. An emphatic spin or kick accented every beat. Once agonizingly inert, the Beatles now leaped off the stage in bursts of manic exhilaration. They were in perpetual motion, and in no time they transformed their sorry sets into something primitive and exciting. And that’s all it took to turn the corner. Word spread quickly around St. Pauli that the Beatles were all the rage, and crowds thronged the Indra to check out the newest British import. Imitating Derry and the Seniors’ high-tension act, they’d started playing what Pete Best referred to as “powerhouse music,” which was basically a selection of all-out rockers with the volume cranked up for effect (and the bass turned down for cover), underscored by a palpitating bass-drum beat and frisky stage pranks. “After a few weeks, you could barely move in the place, it was so jammed” recalls Johnny Byrne. “The heat was terrific, everyone smoked, drank. Everyone was having a blast. There was a real sense that something incredible was going down.”
Watching greedily from the sidelines, Bruno Koschmider could barely contain his delight. Not only had the Beatles succeeded in drawing good crowds, they had established a direct link for audiences between the Indra and the Kaiserkeller. They’d plug Derry down the street, and crowds would gravitate to that show—and vice versa. It was impossible to go to one without being aware of the other. A Hamburg teenager who spent his weekends in St. Pauli found it “possible to pass the whole night going from the Kaiserkeller to the Indra without the need for other entertainment…. There was no place else in the district that offered such an exciting selection of live music.”
And it was nonstop. The scene demanded it. When people strolled by, looking from place to place, their decision whether or not to go into a club was based largely on the music blaring from the doorway. There was no food served in either of the clubs. According to one frequent visitor, “Eating wasn’t part of the equation. You went in there to get pissed, dance, and pick up chicks.” The music had to be loud and hot; otherwise, a potential customer would continue on. That meant working at a brutal pace and pitch, sort of “a baptism by fire,” according to Bill Harry. Even though there were breaks planted at forty-five-minute intervals, there was really never any letdown until well after two in the morning. And the breaks, as they discovered, were merely breathers. There was hardly enough time to recharge, no civilized place to rest. At best, the boys would sit slumped at the bar, uninterrupted by drunken patrons, sipping a fifty-pfennig beer,* or they’d run around the corner for a frikadella—a greasy meat-and-onion patty that they lived on for weeks on end. There was never time for a proper meal—or enough money. The prices in St. Pauli had been jacked up to fleece the tourists. “Besides,” as Howie Casey recalls, “the first week you spent all your money right away and realized you couldn’t afford to eat.” When possible, the bands crowded into a booth at Wienerwald, a cheap deli featuring rotisserie chickens that they shared, or went to Schmu Goos on Schmuckstrasse, which was “a Chinese place that did workingman’s food”; for a few pfennigs, they’d gobble down a big bowl of soup with a roll that would have to hold them for an entire day—or longer.
Adrenaline was an even bigger headache. After a long night’s work jackknifing across a stage to endless wild applause, the boys were so pumped up that it usually took several hours to reach a state where they were calm enough to drift off. (That is, if they weren’t hunting up a party or hanging out in an all-night bar.) Often they didn’t get to sleep until four or five in the morning, and even then it was an unpleasant prospect.
Their accommodations were appalling—even worse than the Seniors’. With utter indifference, Koschmider had stashed the boys, like props, in abject old storage rooms at the back of a run-down cinema he owned at the bottom of the Grosse Freiheit. The Bambi Kino, as it was known, showed dubbed German-language two-reelers practically twenty-four hours a day, old gangster movies and westerns that were streaked and pitted from use. At one time, before the war, the place had functioned as a legitimate theater, but that time was long past, and the once-swank appointments were beat up and decrepit. Their rooms, in a corridor behind the screen, had fared no better—“filthy, dirty, and disgusting” cubicles without windows or proper beds. John, Stuart, and George shared a cell fitted with a camp bed and sofa. Farther down the hall, past the urinal and just off the fire exit, Paul and Pete had adjoining rooms—“the black holes of Calcutta,” as they called them—without any lights, to say nothing of facilities or heat. “It was freezing cold in there,” recalls Johnny Byrne, who visited the Beatles often during their stay in St. Pauli. “We’d knock for them at the side door of the Bambi Kino, and John would answer, standing there in a pair of grandad long johns and a button-down vest. It was too cold for us to hang around, just too bitter and damp, and impossible to have a conversation with the German dialogue booming from the cinema.”
But the Beatles were rarely in their rooms. They spent virtually all their spare time at Bruno Koschmider’s two clubs, either performing or fine-tuning arrangements to help tighten the act. On the face of things, this might have seemed relatively ordinary, but it was unique to the impetuous nature of a rock ’n roll band and just one of the many distinctions that contributed to the Beatles’ prodigious success. Exceptionally conscientious about expanding their appeal, they worked as painstakingly as engineers, constructing a set of songs needed to engage the fitful crowds. It didn’t take long for them to hit on a surefire formula: volume. It got people off. More than anyone so far, the Beatles realized that the function of a bar band wasn’t to promote artistry, expand the musical genre, or even entertain. Bar bands really weren’t performers in the conventional sense, but rather were agitators, and as such they had far more in common with the touts than with show business. From their opening chords, the Beatles let it rip. All-out rockers soon filled every minute of the set. Thanks to Paul’s high, unyielding voice, a barn burner like “Long Tall Sally” could ignite an edgy house, with each successive number arranged to ratchet up the emotional heat. He and John combined on a steady string of rockers: “Johnny B. Goode,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Bony Maronie,” “C’mon Everybody,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” which set a blazing pace.
Most of their songs lasted two and a half or three minutes at the most, making it possible to exhaust maybe twenty songs in a typical set. In the beginning, they often found themselves short a song at the end of a set, forcing the hasty relaunch of, say, “Johnny B. Goode.” Chances are, the crowd never even noticed or, at the least, didn’t mind—but it disheartened the band. They considered it a mark of amateurism, feared that it dulled their competitive edge. So even though they were already overworked, the Beatles devoted hours on end to rehearsing. Most afternoons they met at the Indra, giving the songs a real workout, packing each measure with rhythmic tension and pulling out all the stops, to ensure that the material was hot. But like the Seniors, they soon grew tired of rehearsing each afternoon, instead expanding what songs they already knew into long drawn-out jams. One night they walked up to the Kaiserkeller and watched in awe as the Seniors ate up an entire set with a vapid romp called “Rock with the Seniors,” which was nothing more than a twelve-bar blues riff with shifting rhythmic patterns and no lyric to speak of; every so often, one of the musicians would shout, “Rock with the Seniors!” giving it a kind of “hey-ba-ba-re-bop” holler to hold the pudding together. “What’d I Say,” more than anything else, became what Paul called their trusty “show song.” Paul recalled: “We used to work the hell out of it… kept it going for hours and hours.” And every night it took on a different shape, by either substituting their own lyrics or vamping on the bridge; it could—and often did—take off in a number of directions, perilously close to falling apart at any moment, which made it so exciting to watch. The same occurred with “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” a rollicking tour de force, which could last a good half hour. By mid-September the Beatles had turned a corner. A dancer could walk out of the Indra, go across the street for a pack of cigarettes—or a screw—and still, whenever he got back, catch the same song running.
Upon arriving in Hamburg, the Beatles felt an impulse to appear “professional,” which in England meant well groomed. Eager to look the part, they had taken dress cues from the natty Johnny Gentle, who had impressed upon them the importance of “looking sharp” onstage, and in their own way the Beatles proffered a version of sartorial grace. Dressed in matching lilac-colored sport coats draped over black shirts with a silver stripe on the collar, black slacks, and clay-colored, imitation-crocodile, pointy-toed shoes, or winkle-pickers, they looked more like a Cuban nightclub act. Pete Best, who—perhaps mercifully—joined too late to benefit from the sporty makeover, came up with his own black attire and an Italian navy blue jacket, which put him in the general vicinity of their inelegance.
To their credit, the band never felt self-conscious in the suits, but after playing in them seven nights a week—sweating buckets in them, stretching them out, ripping them, punishing them—the inevitable happened: they began to stink and give way at the seams. In place of proper tailoring, the Beatles took them to the Indra’s bathroom attendant, a stocky, sixty-year-old woman named Rosa Hoffman, known to one and all as simply “Mutti,” who made emergency repairs during intermissions. But eventually that, too, proved futile, as in no time the fabric had decomposed and the matching clothes “went by the board.”
New suits were out of the question. There wasn’t enough money to spare and, anyway, the whole image suddenly seemed tired—especially in Hamburg, where the dress code reached new levels of informality. Thanks to Tony Sheridan, who had always gone his own way, the Beatles were introduced to the Texas Shop, at the top of the Reeperbahn, where they found sleek black leather bomber jackets—Luftwaffe, in this case—and hand-stitched cowboy boots. It was exactly the dark, uncompromising image they’d been looking for—part rebel, part street tough, and wholly in tune with the hard-driving music they were playing. Except for Pete, who preferred to play in shirtsleeves, they each bought an outfit and wore them onstage that same night, making an immediate impression.
The new look showed the influence of the more hard-nosed American performers, Gene Vincent in particular. Moreover, their haircuts (or lack thereof) refined this image—a longer, fuller style that crept over their collars and shook loose during long, raucous jams, but not so long that it would induce hostility, let alone an uproar. The Seniors took notice of the changes but didn’t know what to make of them at first. “We thought they were a pretty scruffy bunch,” recalls Howie Casey, who, along with Derry Wilkie, initially rejected the Beatles’ streetlike approach. But within days, the Seniors felt awkward in their “cheap, junky suits with bagged-out knees and the asses all slack,” so, says Casey, “we bought jeans and stuff rather than fight what we must have known was the coming trend.”
Somehow the new incarnation motivated the Beatles to play even harder, if that were even possible. They really turned it on—and up—squeezing all they could out of the two tiny Truvoices that pumped out their sound. It wasn’t unusual for Pete Best to crawl into place behind his drum set, only to have John or Paul whisper, “Crank it up, Pete, we’re really going for it tonight.” Neighbors complained about the noise, which seemed preposterous, considering the district’s reputation. But because of the Indra’s secluded location, on the perimeter of the Grosse Freiheit, there were residents within earshot. Girlie shows hadn’t disrupted their lives, but the din of rock ’n roll posed real problems.
Normally, Koschmider would have ignored the complaints or used his influence with the police to have them quashed. But the neighbors were mostly elderly, not the least of whom was a widow who lived upstairs and claimed that the music was making her sick. Reluctantly, Bruno ordered the Beatles to tone things down—the “most absurd request they’d ever heard.” No one took it seriously enough to reduce the volume. But the requests, friendly at first, turned intense. Day after day, the police fielded increasing complaints and leaned on Koschmider to comply. Finally, Koschmider had had enough, and in one audacious stroke he closed the Indra.
Ordinarily, this would have spelled doom for the Beatles, but Koschmider wasn’t about to lose his new star attraction. (Besides, they had a month left on their contract.) Instead, he offered the young Liverpudlians the opportunity to share the Kaiserkeller stage. They could alternate sets with Derry and the Seniors, who had another week left on their contract. Koschmider outlined the plan to John, hoping to convince the Beatles of its merits, but it proved an easy sell. The Kaiserkeller meant a bigger stage, better sound, wilder crowds, and, hopefully, lighter hours. As far as John and the Beatles were concerned, they were movin’ on up.
In fact, it was the beginning of the end.
[III]
Dismissing Rory Storm in the early sixties was easy. Unlike the performances of Kingsize Taylor or the Big Three (the reconfigured Cassanovas, sans Cass), the Hurricanes were all flash, with none of the slashing intensity that raised the other bands’ emotional stakes another notch or two. They weren’t exquisitely disciplined like Gerry and the Pacemakers or rhythmically precise like Derry and the Seniors. Although Rory was dubbed “Mr. Showmanship” by local promoters, evidence suggests that his shows were forgettable, the band a muddle of instrumentation. George Harrison, writing from Hamburg, dismissed the Hurricanes in a single word: “crumby.” Rory, he reported, “does a bit of dancing around but it still doesn’t make up for his phoney group.” (“The only person who is any good in the group,” George noted, “was the drummer,” a wiry, bearded lad named Ringo.)
Even so, from the moment they arrived to replace the Seniors, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were treated like outright stars. A sign outside the Kaiserkeller heralded their engagement in large, striking letters, with a postscript—“und the Beatles”—buried feebly below. By all accounts, they were paid more than either the Beatles or the Seniors and were given greater flexibility. They also inherited Derry’s living quarters at the side of the Kaiserkeller stage.
To the Beatles’ credit, the billing mattered naught. Nor were they concerned with the material perks, content that, come what may, they could “blow these guys off the stage.” They actually liked the Hurricanes, having often spent hours in Liverpool with them, hanging out, bullshitting in the Storms’—or rather, Caldwells’—crowded parlor. Stormsville (as Rory insisted on calling his home) was Liverpool Central to the local musicians. Vi Caldwell, or Ma Storm, as she called herself, kept Paul in cigarettes when he was broke, which was nearly always, and made John and George “chick butties”—chicken and butter sandwiches, a Scouser staple. George had casually dated Rory’s sister, Iris, considered “the prettiest girl in the neighborhood,” since 1959, and for a brief time later Paul would court her in a more serious way. Each of the Hurricanes was regarded fondly by the Beatles. Charles “Ty Brien” O’Brien and Wally “Lu Walters” Egmond, who played lead and bass, respectively, were amiable guys and a wellspring of new songs, having introduced “Fever” and “Summertime” to the communal repertoire. Johnny Byrne talked incessantly about rock ’n roll, and John, Paul, and George listened: the more obscure and esoteric the topic, the more enthusiastically they responded. They were friendly, even flattering, toward Rory; moreover, John, who relished tormenting anyone with the slightest handicap, resisted repeated opportunities to ridicule the severely stuttering Rory. In fact, the only Hurricane who eluded the young Beatles (aside from George) was Rory’s drummer, the hound-faced, self-mocking jester from the Dingle named Ritchie Starkey, whom the band fondly called Ringo.
From the opening night on October 4, 1960, the two bands commandeered the Kaiserkeller stage with a red-hot, rough-and-tumble force. For more than seven uninterrupted hours, the bands churned out a string of high-octane rockers that left the capacity crowds in a sweaty, beer-soaked frenzy. “Every night was another amazing jam fest,” recalls Byrne. “The music got everyone so cranked up and the whole place just shook, like Jell-O. It was a solid mass of bodies. You couldn’t see through the smoke. Fights would break out on the dance floor or in the seats, and these huge glasses would be flying every which way. The bouncers all had truncheons. If there was a sailor on the floor, you’d see them lay into him, kicking him. And Koschmider would run up, screaming: ‘Don’t stop the music! Play on!’ ”
And play on they did. Every night it got louder and longer—seven o’clock in the evening until five in the morning. “Marathon sessions,” as the two bands mutually termed them, with a “very friendly rivalry” serving to fatten the stakes. If Rory delivered a solid rendering of “Blue Suede Shoes,” John countered with his own crack version; Wally would warble “September’s Song” and Paul would squeeze the sap out of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” One of the Hurricanes recalls how Paul threw them a curve one night by belting out “Bama Lama Bama Loo.” “It was such an incredible number, it just buried us,” he says. “We spent the entire next day at a record store in Hamburg trying to come up with something powerful enough to top that.” There was no letup—and no downtime. If a musician needed a bathroom break or got dehydrated and stopped for a sip of water, Koschmider angrily waved him back onstage, demanding a full ensemble at all times, as stipulated in their contract. “I pay five men!” he’d shout, turning red in the face. “Mach Schau! Mach Schau!”
“It got very funny out there, very fast,” says Johnny Byrne, who helped ignite the appreciable hijinks. “I used to egg John on and he’d swear down the mike, in English, assuming the audience couldn’t understand him. He’d say, ‘Go on, you fucking Krauts, you fucking ignorant German bastards!’ It was all we could do not to piss ourselves.” Other nights Paul performed in a bedsheet. Emboldened, George draped an old, yellowed toilet seat around his neck and goose-stepped across the boards. Word spread through Hamburg that the Beatles were verrückt—crazy—their shows insanely unpredictable. In a moment of typical abandon, John paraded jauntily onstage in a pair of “scabby” swimming trunks, selecting a choice moment to moon the unsuspecting audience. According to Pete Best, “There was a stunned silence, then the place erupted… [with] people banging bottles on the tables, jumping up and down.”
Onstage, however, that was about as wild as things got. There was lots of clowning and immature antics, obnoxious jokes, the occasional outburst. A musician remembers John picking a fight with a drunken sailor who heckled him from the dance floor—“the guy tried to climb up onstage after Lennon offered to flatten his nose”—before the waiters hustled the culprit outside. For years, stories circulated about how the Beatles did horrible things while playing at the Kaiserkeller. Several scenarios were concocted by Allan Williams, who dined out for years on tart, black commentary about the boys, John in particular. But eyewitnesses indicate that wasn’t the case at all. They were simply undisciplined kids away from home for the first time, engaging in as much rude behavior as they could get away with.
Of course, that was fueled in no small way by a constant liquid diet. Everywhere in Hamburg, beer flowed like water, but nowhere was it as copious and affordable as in the Kaiserkeller, where the bands drank for free. To working-class Scousers, free beer was a jackpot, “like winning the lottery.” First, being paid a decent wage to play rock ’n roll, and now downing beer as a job benefit! They could hardly believe their good fortune.
Like the Seniors before them, the Beatles went on a bender from the moment they unpacked. Hardly an hour went by without a beer of some kind. Mostly, they feasted on the cheap watered-down variety, which came in little stubby bottles, and later, after one of the musicians slipped Bruno Koschmider’s Danish cellarman a few extra bob, “he fixed [them] up with the good stuff.” During those first weeks in Hamburg, they drank as much as quickly as possible, not believing it would last. One after the next, they downed bottles, fortifying themselves through the overheated sets. And after a series of hard, raunchy numbers, when the dance floor was jumping, club patrons would send drinks up to the stage, big trays balanced with foaming steins that the band was expected to chug. “German customers would say, ‘You must drink, boys, you must finish the drink,’ ” Pete Best recalled, “and there’d be some sessions, especially at the weekend, when the drinks were coming up faster than our playing.”
Musicians had to be careful about what and whom they refused in St. Pauli. In some cases, fear replaced common sense when they were offered yet another round of drinks, especially when it involved the club owners or their associates who were regarded—and rightly so—as violent “gangsters.” Paul McCartney remembered how the mobsters “would come in late at night… and send a little tray of schnapps”—called doppelkorn—“up to the band,” demanding that they drink it down straightaway. At first, the Beatles were reluctant, desperately trying to talk their way out of it without offending anyone, but it was hopeless and certainly not worth provoking a confrontation. “There were gas guns and murderers amongst us, so you weren’t messing around here,” McCartney recalled. “So we’d drink the schnapps and they’d occasionally send up pills.”
The pills, of course, were amphetamines. They were available over the counter in the form of diet pills, called Preludin, and favored by overweight housewives, but most were repackaged for recreational use by the German underworld, which controlled the market with an iron fist. “Prellies” and Purple Hearts, another form of speed, were the drugs of choice on the Reeperbahn. Within the next three years, they would be joined by virtually the entire line of narcotics, with Hamburg eventually becoming the gateway for heroin into Russia. But during the Beatles’ stay there, it was limited to speed and just about every musician put it to good use.
The Beatles had fought fatigue from the outset. Even after playing their initial marathon session, “they were so exhausted they could barely move.” Beer wasn’t the answer; too many drinks made the musicians feel bloated and sluggish. But a highball—a potent combo of stimulants—fired the backup jets. According to Ray Ennis, “Once you had a few beers and the odd pill, you could stay awake for days and didn’t give a shit.”
With little else to sustain them, the Beatles relied more and more on Preludin to maintain their stamina through the endless weeks of performances. John, already struggling with alcoholism, “gobbled them down” like candy, and George, in a long, disjointed letter to his friend Arthur Kelly reported “eating Prellie sandwiches” as a supplement to battle the twelve-hour nights. Stuart and Paul also experimented with speed, although to a somewhat lesser degree. Ever cautious, Paul determined that the quick high “was dodgy… you could get a little too wired on stuff like that” and managed to keep his edge sharp with only the occasional pill or two. Only Pete Best abstained, further setting his own beat apart from the rest of the band.
With speed to lube their engines, both the Beatles and the Hurricanes cranked the energy into overdrive. Songs grew more aggressive, convoluted, and unpredictable, the volume eventually peaked out, and the boys gyroscoped on and off the stage, working themselves into a frenzy and leaving everyone exhilarated—and exhausted. “We tried any number of crazy things out of boredom,” Byrne says. The bands traded members; they traded repertoires; they traded instruments and even their mock-insults with the audience, eventually turning their attention to the rickety stage.
It wasn’t a proper stage by any stretch of the imagination, just a few planks of warped wood supported by empty Schweppes crates. It had always slumped to one side, thanks in no small part to the forcible Seniors, who had busted through it one night shortly after the Beatles arrived in Hamburg. Bruno’s promises to have it fixed rang hollow, and there things stood.
But not for long. Busting the stage was too much of a temptation. In no time, wagers were made, and a foolproof method proposed: the aptly named stomp. Using the heels of their new cowboy boots, the guitarists would mete out a savage beat to each song, torturing the planks of the stage. The Beatles tried it out first, with an extreme rendition of “Roll Over Beethoven” that was almost Russian in its execution. A friend who watched from the side of the stage recalled how when John launched into the chorus—“roll over Beethoven…”—Paul, George, and Stuart answered: stomp! stomp! stomp! Again and again, the trio converged near stage center, deemed the most fragile spot—stomp! stomp! stomp!—bashing the soft planks with their heels. When Rory tried leaping off the upright piano, same thing. Toward the weekend, a hairline fracture appeared in the planks. When a musician put any weight at all on them, he could see the boxes underneath and knew the end was near. Friday night, they vowed, was it.
When the big night arrived, the Beatles gave the stage several good beatings, but as Pete Best recalled, “it hung on and we were getting frustrated.” After four sets, they gave up in disgust and went across the street for breakfast. According to Johnny Byrne, “We went on and saw it was really getting ropy. Then, about two o’clock in the morning, Rory summoned up enough energy and leaped off the piano right onto a weak spot. There was a loud crack and all the planks went up in a v shape as the center caved in. Moments later, the amplifiers toppled over and slid into the hole, along with the mikes and Ringo’s cymbals.”
Bruno Koschmider was furious. He came running from his office to inspect the damage, shooing Rory and the Hurricanes from the stage. One glance was all it took for him to determine that it was hopeless. Live music was replaced by a jukebox, and the Hurricanes joined the Beatles in Harold’s across the street to celebrate.
All seven boys crammed into two adjoining booths, laughing and telling war stories over bowls of cornflakes and pints of freezing cold milk. A toast was in order! They were about to clink glasses when the front door burst open and Koschmider and his bouncers flew in with an all-too-familiar look on their faces. “They had their koshes, and they started setting about us,” says Byrne, who was wedged in a booth against the wall. The boys managed to scramble up and over the tables, sending cornflakes and milk flying, but not before the thugs got in a few bruising whacks.
The next night, everyone got to the Kaiserkeller early to inspect the new stage, but to their collective dismay, not much had changed. The old stage had been repaired in the most makeshift manner, with a few new planks slapped across the crates and chairs wedged underneath to hold everything in place. Otherwise, it was even more treacherous and unstable, “like a waterbed.” But to the bruised and battered Beatles, it would make no difference.
[IV]
It had never occurred to the Beatles that they might have fans. Girls were certainly no indication of their musical talent—at least, not the girls who chased them in Hamburg. Most were what Pete Best regarded as “high-class call girls,” strippers or hookers who worked the district and took a fleeting fancy to young English musicians. Nor did the Kaiserkeller regulars show any real interest in the band. They either danced or talked among themselves. “Nobody really looked at the stage,” recalled an observer. “The Beatles were just like background music.”
In the ever-shifting bad light, it seemed unlikely that any of the Beatles noticed the trio sitting rigidly upright near the front and to the left of the stage. Each night they came into the club about nine o’clock—two extraordinary-looking young men and a woman who did everything in their power not to draw attention to themselves. Even so, they stood out like sore thumbs, dressed rather exotically as they were, in suede jackets, wool sweaters, jeans, and round-toed slippers. Although they were largely ignored by the black-leather-jacket-and-boots crowd, there was an inherent sense of danger to their presence, their fey appearance being enough of an excuse to warrant a beating from the German teds, whom they referred to as “rockers.” Eventually, during a break, one of the young men approached John rather meekly and, in fractured English, introduced himself as Klaus Voormann, a Berlin-born graphic artist, pressing a crumpled record sleeve he’d designed into John’s hands. John was uninterested and shunted him off on Stuart, whom he referred to somewhat backhandedly as “the artist round here.”
Stuart didn’t share John’s reservations. In fact, Stuart had spotted all three from the stage, mistaking them for “typical bohemians.” Embarrassed and flattered, he discovered them staring at him in an openly seductive manner and, in a letter to a friend, admitted an instant mutual attraction, acknowledging that it was “extremely difficult to keep my eyes off them.” He’d even searched for the trio during a break, trying to make some kind of contact, but concluded that they had left before the show was over.
Introduced at last, he was “completely captivated.” The three, it turned out, were former students at the Meisterschule für Mode, a kitchen sink–type art college in Hamburg not unlike the art college back in Liverpool, and had zeroed in on the lithe, theatrical Stuart as a fellow traveler. For everyone concerned, it was love at first sight. Stuart was immediately drawn to both “boys”—Voormann and Jürgen Vollmer—who, with their exquisitely handsome faces and unself-conscious flair, cast a striking presence in any crowd. The woman was in a category all to herself. At almost twenty-two, Astrid Kirchherr already had little in common with the other German fräulein who shared her blond good looks. Strong and willowy like Jean Seberg, with a wide, flat forehead and distant ice-blue eyes, she captivated men with attitude rather than beauty. “The minute she walked into a room all heads immediately turned her way,” says Bill Harry, “and she was in full control of that room.” Neither outwardly personable nor particularly well read, she relied more on an aura of mystery and dreamy sophistication that found a receptive audience among young, frustrated artistic misfits who sensed in her a kind of Circean eminence and for whom she became a guiding force. Gibson Kemp, who later played drums for Rory Storm and eventually married her, credits Astrid’s beguiling influence to an almost innate—and wildly eccentric—visionary style. “She had a tremendous feel for shape and form,” he says, an unerring eye for the aesthetic, the unconventional, even the kinky, born out of a preoccupation to model herself after avant-garde Left Bank intellectuals.
Despite the difficulties of their often impenetrable accents, the vulnerable Sutcliffe was clearly entranced. He wrote a friend immediately after meeting the trio, explaining in no uncertain terms how their energy was irresistibly addictive. “I had never met anybody like them…,” he gushed. “It’s somehow like a dream which I’m still participating in.”
The young Germans were equally in thrall of their Liverpool darling. To them, he not only looked different from the other Beatles but seemed introspective and “refined.” Jürgen Vollmer recalled, “My impression was that Stuart just didn’t fit in. He was strange when compared to others in that group. He wasn’t [a] part of the Beatles; he was always like an outsider… dreaming all the time that he played wrong notes and got looks from Paul and George.” The young Germans felt an immediate affinity and confessed as much. “They asked me why I was playing in a rock and roll band as I obviously wasn’t the type,” Stuart wrote to a friend. He also admitted being delighted that they’d pegged him as an artist (unaware that John had already tipped off Voormann to that fact):
They could see immediately, they said… Here was I, feeling the most insipid working member of the group being told how much superior I looked—this along side the great Romeo John Lennon and his two stalwarts Paul and George—the casanovas [sic] of Hamburg!
The trio—whom John dubbed the “exis” as a gibe to their existentialist affectations—knew practically nothing about rock ’n roll. Like most college students, they’d been fans of traditional jazz, with a bit of Nat King Cole and the Platters sifted into the mix. They were not alone. Rock ’n roll was still an anomaly to most of Germany, whose contact with the outside world lagged in the process of being repaired. None of them had ever seen rock ’n roll performed live, ignorant of the heated excitement it inspired, its racy suggestiveness. Not knowing what to expect, they were “totally and immediately fascinated by rock. That was it [for jazz].” From that point on in their lives, rock ’n roll delivered the gospel, and the Beatles were its perfect missionaries: entertaining, sexy, unpredictable. “We were totally fans, totally in awe,” Vollmer remembered. “The quality, the chemistry, the way they interrelated was… marvelous.” After seeing them that first time, the exis were overwhelmed, perhaps none of them more so than Astrid. She said, “It was like a merry-go-round in my head….They looked absolutely astonishing…. [M]y whole life changed in a couple minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.”
Astrid’s way in to the Beatles was with her camera. An enthusiastic photographer (although an assistant to a well-known fashion and product lensman, she was nothing more than an amateur enthusiast), she offered to take pictures of the band in various casual poses around Hamburg, and the Beatles eagerly accepted. To the band, this was an unprecedented offer. Even among the longer-established groups like Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, it was rare to receive anything more than fuzzy snapshots taken by friends. By Astrid’s calling the outing “a session,” it elevated the shoot to something of more consequence, to the extent that they took it very seriously.
The photographs taken that afternoon in der Dom—a municipal park close by the Reeperbahn—show no ordinary group of musicians of the type available for weddings, church fetes, and socials. On the contrary, they resonate powerfully in ways that struck down all former conceptions. Astrid, in her enthusiasm, captured the grittiness, attitude, energy, and easy confidence that distinguished the Beatles from their slick, simpering counterparts. Hardly a show band or “teddy boys,” as they’d been described by previous chroniclers, they projected a cool, postured identity, and in the process established the classic iconography for rock ’n roll bands for the next forty years.
Looking at these photos nearly half a century later, it seems extraordinary how effortlessly they took to this new identity. There was no precedent for it, no mentor to teach them how or what to project. Nevertheless, the Beatles show an acute awareness for individualism and style. Historians have said they basically adapted mannerisms gleaned from The Wild One—more specifically, its enigmatic star, Marlon Brando—but that seems limited. In a sense, what the Beatles conveyed was evolutionary, a shaping power, extending the cultural pose of the young. In one frame, taken against an old fairgrounds wagon, their whole aura is firmly in place: strength, scorn, rebellion, danger, mystery, sex appeal—presence. The Beatles appear almost eerily detached, insouciant, perhaps even a little threatening. John and Paul already look like the modern image of rock stars, with faces as composed and striking as the chords they played on their guitars. George, a gangly stick of a kid, stares directly, defiantly, into the camera, while Pete and Stuart flank the nucleus as a pair of oddly mismatched bookends. In another, posed in an overtly arty way on the hood of a tractor, George, Stuart, and John practically assault the lens with stares of frank, consuming heat. It’s an explicit look of such hip, intense power—the new face of rock ’n roll.
Intuitive, ambitious, aroused, Astrid was not about to let a treasure like the Beatles slip through her fingers. Following the session in der Dom, she drove the band (minus Pete Best, who chose not to accompany them) straight to her mother’s house in the rather posh suburb of Altona, where she entertained them with afternoon tea. To a man, the Beatles were properly impressed and taken by surprise. The sight of Astrid’s handsome, solid-looking house and fashionable neighborhood was totally alien to the four boys, who had seen nothing of Hamburg outside of its grungy red-light district. Flowers and shrubs hugged the front steps, with a welcoming sweep of lawn. Children raced bicycles along the freshly paved street. Cars gleamed at the curb. It was tasteful, without being what local people referred to as spiessbürger, or grossly bourgeois, with a curl of the lip. It reminded the band of Childwall, in Liverpool, a suburb of impeccably manicured homes and estates, housing the city’s upper crust.
Impressed as they were, however, the Beatles’ reaction turned unsettled when they were escorted upstairs to Astrid’s attic studio. It was a sight for which they were totally unprepared. The room, which faced the back of the house, was like Satan’s lair—black curtains and sheets covered the shuttered window, the furniture had been painted black to match the bedspread, a black cloth covered the mirror, with sheets of aluminum foil pasted to the walls to reflect light from the black candles that cast a somber glow. Astrid, completely blasé, attributed it to her “Cocteau phase,” which seemed to satisfy her openmouthed audience and heighten their intrigue.
In fact, the room had been decorated for Klaus Voormann, who had spent much of the previous two years there as Astrid’s steady lover. Now, Klaus lived in an apartment “literally around the corner,” and while he and Astrid still saw each other every day, the relationship had suddenly turned platonic—and for good reason. Moments after meeting Stuart Sutcliffe, Astrid had fallen headlong and seriously in love with him. At first, it was purely physical, spurred by his “tight jeans and leather jacket,” but after those first few minutes, Jürgen Vollmer said, she became “fascinated with Stuart… his mysterious image, his artistic ties, [and] it was more chemical than anything else.”
And not at all one-sided. “[Stuart] let it be known how much he was infatuated [with her],” a friend recalls. Others have said he “was besotted” with her. Almost from the start, Stuart began hounding Astrid’s inner circle for any scrap of information about her—how she thought, what she liked, who she fancied. He didn’t want to alienate Klaus, who remained devotedly at her side, but there was no secret to their mutual attraction; it was unrestrained and intense, and grew increasingly more passionate with each passing day. Pete Best, who watched things unfold from atop the drum stand, viewed it “like one of those fairy stories.” And to a certain extent it was, although not one blessed with a happy ending.
[V]
From the beginning, John and Paul relied heavily on early recording heroes—most notably, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly—to give the vocals personality, then factored in their own distinctive tonal qualities for color and shading. While both were essentially tenors, Paul’s voice tended toward being smooth, upbeat, and whimsical, while John, who was more nasal, provided an essential edge, albeit jagged at times, that stirred the blend with ambiguity. One of them would tackle the lead in any given song. As the melody expanded, the other—practically waiting to pounce—chimed in with a line of harmony until their voices overlapped and interweaved. Duets, however, are unstable compounds; tensions are unavoidably created from the moment each voice splinters into harmony. But when John and Paul sang together they pulled toward the middle. They complemented each other but also, to some degree, tried to match each other without losing balance.
There was more to the Beatles’ magic than John’s and Paul’s voices, however. George’s guitar had become the anchor to the arrangements, giving them form as well as movement. The incidental fills that unspooled between melody lines drew songs together and reinforced interest where things normally fell apart. Later, George would mastermind the Beatles’ magnificent leads, playing them almost like a machine, but in Hamburg his riffs were in perpetual motion, sheepdogging, keeping the wandering, sometimes capricious energy of the rhythm guitars in focus, while other times brightening their steady patterns.
As it happened, George could also sing, not quite as stylishly as John and Paul, but with consistency and fervor. He proved more than capable as a lead vocalist, handling the chores on “Young Blood,” “Three Cool Cats,” and occasionally “Roll Over Beethoven,” on which he alternated with John. When John took the spotlight, Paul and George doubled together at another microphone, creating what one Hamburg fan called “a very charming image.”
Only Stuart remained a lingering problem. Nothing had changed: he had absolutely no facility for the bass, no innate feel for music. Even the exis, his most ardent admirers, recognized his inadequacy onstage. None of the Beatles had any illusions about Stu. They knew he was inept, eternally an amateur. But something else counted for more than pure ability: he was a mate. Yet for all the friendship in the world, his welcome as a Beatle was wearing thin. The better the Beatles got, the more dissatisfied Paul became. “I was always practical, thinking our band could be great,” Paul said, “but with [Stu] on bass there was always something holding us back.” He considered Stuart the “weak link,” too glaring an embarrassment; it reflected on all of them, not just on Stuart. It troubled John as well, but he seemed helpless—or unwilling—to do anything about it. At times, the others suggested that Stuart turn away from the audience, looking moodily over his shoulder instead, so that the misplaced fingering wasn’t easily detected. But people had ears, and with the band’s rapid strides, the clams he played sounded ever more pronounced.
Stuart wasn’t oblivious. In a letter to his friend Sue Williams written as early as October 1960, he explained:
I have definitely decided to pack in the band at the beginning of January… particularly after what I forfeited in return for a few months in a foreign country*—but my curiosity is quenched—as far as rock and roll is concerned anyway.
It might have helped had he conveyed this decision to the other Beatles. Given January as a reference, they might have played out these few months in a wisp of lighthearted amiability, with the anticipation of a fresh start in the New Year. But if Stuart contemplated leaving, as he’d implied, he kept the news to himself, which only served to sow resentment among the once-contented Beatles.
There is no doubt his musical shortcomings cost him dearly with John. Signs of souring showed in their usually puncture-proof relationship: veiled glances at first, then eventually the unforeseen snide comment lobbed into the midst of a group conversation. With John, there was always a lot of acid-tipped barbs flying around, but now he aimed them more accurately at Stuart, who internalized them, without a word of self-defense. Wrathful, John snapped without warning. He poked fun at Stuart’s gracefulness, his persona, his size, and, of course, his infatuation with Astrid. “He was always kidding, but kidding in a way that was borderline hurting,” said Jürgen Vollmer. As a small, mannered young man, Stuart had endured his share of taunts, in most cases gamely defending himself against them. “But he just seemed to take it from John,” recalls Bill Harry. “Stuart was no match for him.”
On October 21, a new club opened around the corner on the Reeperbahn, featuring an act unaffected by competition. That illustrious bad boy, Tony Sheridan, was back in business, headlining at the Top Ten, a sensational, glitzy venue in a huge space formerly occupied by a peep show, and fronting a configuration of the Jets, his revolving-door backing band, that knocked audiences dead. The Beatles went to see him every night after their show, sometimes even slipping in during breaks, stationing themselves practically at his feet so they could pick up pointers, songs, licks, riffs, anything that punched up their act.
Not surprisingly, no one proved more influential to the Beatles during this stretch. Tony did all sorts of obscure material, from Little Richard B-sides to urban blues; he did lovely versions of Bobby Darin’s “Mighty Mighty Man” and “I’ll Be There” and hot-wired standards such as “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Fever,” and “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” until they kicked out the jams. The Beatles pinched “Besame Mucho” from him, along with Bill Haley’s gasoline-powered “Skinny Minnie,” the song Sheridan always closed with. Thanks to Tony they got hip to R&B gurus like Jimmy Reed, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Witherspoon, and John Lee Hooker. He was a walking encyclopedia of important material, to say nothing of the way he handled a guitar. “I’ve never seen anybody equal to him,” musician John Frankland says forty years later, post-Hendrix, post-Allman, post-Thompson, post-Clapton. “He was a musician’s musician”—a contortionist, an elocutionist with six strings. Over the years, he’d learned how to make the guitar talk—albeit in his own oddball language. “He would play solos that ran completely off-key, but somehow he would stay within the lines,” recalls Johnny Byrne, who often accompanied the Beatles to Tony’s sets at the Top Ten and watched openmouthed as he ran down half a dozen songs. Unlike his sidekicks with their solid-body Fenders and fancy Ricks, Sheridan wielded a big-bellied Martin Dreadnought with an electric pickup wedged under the strings, not a flexible instrument by any stretch of the imagination, and plied it like a knife and fork. Nothing got to him, except inertia. “He’d get guitar diarrhea—he couldn’t stop playing,” says Gibson Kemp, who described how Tony would “play ‘Skinny Minnie’ as the last song on Saturday morning at six [o’clock], and he’d still be playing it at eight, as they cleaned the club.”
And no one worked harder onstage. He worked his husky voice until it cracked like old plaster, worked it to the bone every night. And he put his body through the kind of physical punishment that had no precedent in this idiom. John Frankland recalls how difficult it was to appear on the same bill. “When you followed Tony onstage, the microphone would be full of snot,” he says. “And where he had been standing, you’d think somebody had thrown a bottle of water because that’s how much the guy sweat. He’d come offstage literally soaking wet. That’s how hard he pushed—he was a worker extraordinaire! No one could keep up with him.”
Only a year later, Liverpool bands would complain about how the Beatles set a bad example by talking among themselves and to the audience, even smoking, while they performed onstage. But that, too, can be traced to Tony Sheridan, who played by his own rules. He never shut up, keeping up a running dialogue with the fans. Or, recalls Frankland: “He’d turn around in mid-song and scream at the drummer: ‘You fucking son of a bitch!’ Once, for no apparent reason, I saw him whack [pianist] Roy Young with a tambourine. He didn’t give a damn about the audience. Tony played for himself.”
All nonsense aside, however, he was a sight to behold. There was so much to learn from the way he worked a room, so much to absorb. The Beatles and the Hurricanes sensed that from the get-go. “In the end,” recalls Johnny Byrne, “we started doing sets with him—Rory would get up first, then the Beatles. It was like a crazy jam session. We weren’t getting paid for it, but it didn’t matter. We honestly loved it.”
So did the Top Ten audience. Word spread through Hamburg that the new club had it all, and that wasn’t just limited to the talent. Everything about the Top Ten was bigger, better, bolder, brassier—a fact not lost on the Beatles. “We suddenly realized [it] was a far better club than Koschmider’s,” recalled Pete Best. “Better clientele, plus the sound system had echo mikes, reverb and all that type of stuff.” The Beatles had been slaving away under dreadful circumstances for almost four months. Now they wanted better working conditions, more money, a new stage—and after they were invited to Sheridan’s cozy flat above the Top Ten, a scene of nightly wild parties, well, they wanted that, too.
The last thing Koschmider expected was a power play by this ungrateful British band. He turned the Beatles down flat, reminding them of their existing contract extension, along with a clause that forbade them from playing at another club within a five-kilometer radius without his permission. Clearly, he’d heard about the crowd-pleasing jams with Sheridan and was taking steps to prevent any more of them.
As far as Bruno was concerned, that should have been the end of it. But the Beatles, stung by his curt rebuff, approached Peter Eckhorn, the Top Ten’s slick, cutthroat young owner, and inquired about the possibility of a job. Eckhorn recognized them immediately as the band that had teamed up so successfully with Tony Sheridan. No doubt he also recognized the advantage it would give him in a heated turf war with Bruno Koschmider. As it happened, the current lineup of Jets were returning to London, necessitating a new house band to back his flaky star, and Eckhorn offered them the job on the spot.
This development inflamed Koschmider, who went on the offensive. He terminated the Beatles’ contract at once, invoking a clause that bound them to employment for another, final month. Fortunately, Eckhorn agreed to wait. But the interim climaxed in fiasco. For months George had been flouting a local curfew, the Ausweiskontrolle, that forbade minors from being out after ten o’clock at night. The band was required to make an announcement from the stage, a few minutes before the curfew went into effect, at which time police canvassed the crowd, examining passports. Ironically, the authorities never thought to check the band, and George, who was still seventeen, had skated free all these months. Suddenly, however, on the evening of November 20, he came under scrutiny. No one knew who tipped off the police, but everyone suspected it was Bruno Koschmider. At the same time it was discovered that George had no work permit. “So I had to leave [Germany],” he said. “I had to go home on my own.” No grace period was extended; he was ordered to comply within twenty-four hours.
Through the early-morning hours, George worked frantically to teach John the lead guitar parts to their songs so that the Beatles could function as a quartet. Merely a capable rhythm guitarist, John didn’t have the chops to pull off anything that required more intricate fretwork. Then someone—no one is sure who—came up with a clever solution: they wouldn’t need a lead playing behind Tony Sheridan. It made more sense to leave the Kaiserkeller early and take their chances with Koschmider.
Seizing a competitive advantage, Eckhorn offered the Beatles immediate work along with a modest attic apartment above the Top Ten. It seemed like the perfect antidote to an otherwise deteriorating situation. Without delay, John and Stuart moved their gear in and claimed a set of bunk beds along the wall. Paul and Pete returned to the Bambi Kino to collect their things. According to accounts given by both of them, the theater was dark when they got there. There was no way to see along the hall, much less their belongings, so they stuck condoms to a nail in the concrete wall and set fire to them. “This gave us just enough light to throw our stuff into our suitcases,” Pete recalled.
Sometime in the early morning of December 1, only hours after the boys had gone to bed, two plainclothes German policemen burst into the Top Ten, seeking Paul and Pete for questioning. Allowed nothing more than to dress, the boys were hustled off to the local station house, where they were grilled on their whereabouts for the past twenty-four hours. It took a bit of doing, piecing together the phrases of broken English, before the boys deduced what the problem was. Their breach of contract and sneaky departure had apparently infuriated Bruno Koschmider, who, out of revenge, accused them of “attempting to burn down the Bambi Kino.” It was a ludicrous charge, yet nonetheless effective. Paul and Pete did their best to explain away the incident—to no avail. The police were not amused and decided to scare the British hooligans, transferring them to a dingy jail cell for several hours before finally deporting them.
Leaving behind their clothing and instruments, Paul and Pete arrived back in Liverpool the next day, exhausted, broke, and greatly disillusioned. John and Stuart had remained in Hamburg, but without work permits it was impossible for them to earn a living. Besides, there was no one left to play with. John stayed only long enough to cadge money for a train ticket home. Stuart, recovering from a head cold, borrowed airfare from Astrid and followed him several weeks later.
The incredible adventure was over. The Beatles had not only crept home penniless and in disgrace but had burned several important bridges back in Germany. Each had to do some fancy explaining to his parents, to whom he’d boasted about fame and riches before setting off for Hamburg. In almost every case, they left out key details about the gig’s bitter resolution and avoided any speculation about their future. Perhaps more notably, they couldn’t face one another. John suffered from such a hollow-eyed depression, friends remember, that after Aunt Mimi helped clean him up, he crawled into bed, locked his door, and refused most company. When he finally did appear, two weeks later, no attempt was made to reach Paul. George, too, said he “felt ashamed” and looked for work, as did Paul, who glumly took a menial job, at his father’s insistence. There was little, if any, feeling of optimism. Pete and his mother worked the phone in an effort to recover the band’s lost equipment—which they did—but for several weeks afterward no one touched base. It seemed pointless. They weren’t saying as much, but each of the Beatles was convinced that his career in the band was over.