John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  With his four months’ greater experience, Sheridan was an ideal guide to the Reeperbahn’s more exotic diversions, like the Schwülen laden. Stu Sutcliffe later wrote home in amazement that the transvestites were “all harmless and very young” and it was actually possible to speak to one “without shuddering.” Though raised amid the same homophobia as his companions, John seemed totally unshocked by St. Pauli’s abundant drag scene; indeed, he often seemed actively to seek it out. “There was one particular club he used to like,” Tony Sheridan remembers, “full of these big guys with hairy hands, deep voices—and breasts. But they used to make an effort to talk English. There was something about the place that seemed to make John feel at home.”

  Sheridan also brought with him a crucial friend and ally from within the St. Pauli community. Horst Fascher was a pocket-sized twenty-four-year-old of fearsome reputation: trained at the Reeperbahn’s own boxing academy, he was an ex-featherweight champion with a prison record for accidentally killing a sailor in a street brawl. He was at the same time a hopeless romantic, besotted by rock ’n’ roll and fascinated by the humor and speech patterns of the young Englishmen who were spraying it over his home turf. He had become Sheridan’s unofficial protector at the Kaiserkeller and now called himself his manager, though the role had little to do with taking bookings or collecting fees. “There were always drunks in the place who thought they could sing better than the musicians and would jump on the stage and try to grab the mike. I would always be there to stop these guys from bothering Tony.”

  Fascher first met John at Harald’s, the little café where the Beatles would go for chicken soup after their night’s work at the Indra. “He was drinking beer though it was four, five o’clock in the morning. And his eyes were sticking out like untertassen [saucers] from the Preludin. He still make me laugh more than I ever laugh in my life before. Tony said to the five of them ‘If you get any problems, Horst will sort it out.’”

  From then on, the Beatles, too, were under Fascher’s protection. “I could see that if I didn’t watch out for them, John would get them into big trouble, or himself on his own. He was playing the tough guy with nothing to back it up, which was a dangerous thing to do on the Reeperbahn. But I love the guy from the moment I first meet him. I never hit him, although he often try to make me; he call me a fuckin’ Nazi bastard. Words were only over our lips, but in our hearts we know that we needed each other, that we respected each other, that we could depend on each other.”

  At the Indra club meanwhile, after nearly seven weeks’ hard labor, John’s dedication to mach schau had paid unexpected dividends. Directly above the club lived an elderly war widow who subjected Bruno Koschmider to such a relentless stream of complaints about the noise that St. Pauli’s municipal authority stepped in, ordering Koschmider to terminate live music at the Indra and return it to its less disruptive role of strip club. As they had always wanted, the Beatles were moved to the Kaiserkeller in place of the cobbled-together quartet who had been alternating with Derry and the Seniors; Stu Sutcliffe was restored to their ranks and their original three-month contract was extended to December 31.

  For this privilege, they were expected to give an even longer nightly show, starting at 7:30 and finishing at 2:30, a total of five and a half hours punctuated by only three half-hour breaks. To fill up the time, John would later recall, “every song had to last about 20 minutes and have 20 solos.” Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” with its call-and-response “Hey—he-ey…Uh—u-uh” and endlessly repeatable and exciting guitar-piano riff, could be stretched out almost indefinitely. They learned to keep playing no matter what the distraction, over the deafening hubbub of a thousand beer-stoked voices, even during fights that were like scenes from some epic Western, with people smashing chairs over one another’s heads and swallow-diving from tables. As John remembered, one sure portent of trouble was a familiar whiff of Senior Service cigarettes, meaning that “the English were in,” either sailors or army national servicemen.

  In the Kaiserkeller’s prime stageside boat-booths could be found a more affluent and subtly threatening clientele. According to John, these were “gangsters…the local Mafia. They’d send a crate of champagne on stage, imitation German champagne, and we’d have to drink it…. I used to be so pissed I’d be lying on the floor behind the piano while the rest of the group were playing. I’d be onstage, fast asleep. And we always ate onstage, too, because we never had time to eat…. George threw some food at me once, onstage…. I said I would smash his face in for him. We had a shouting match but that was all. I never did anything. And I once threw a plate of food over George.”

  On October 5, Derry and the Seniors reached the end of their contract with Bruno Koschmider. Rather than promote the Beatles to headline status at the Kaiserkeller, Koschmider called on Allan Williams for yet another Mersey group, and Williams sent out Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. On arrival, they found they were expected to take over their predecessors’ squalid sleeping quarters in the Kaiserkeller’s basement. This they declined to do, preferring the comparative luxury of being five in one room at the dockside seamen’s mission.

  The double attraction of “Rory Storm and his Hurikan und the Beatles Liverpool-England” appeared in split shifts, playing alternating sets of an hour and a half each over an incredible twelve-hour period. In the nightly mach schau stakes, John now faced formidable competition, not only from extrovert Rory himself, with his toppling blond cockade, his turquoise suit, and his love of dancing on pianos and shinning up walls, but also from the Hurricanes’ lead guitarist, known by the cowboyish tag of Johnny Guitar, and even from their drummer, Ringo Starr, who by comparison with the stolidly pounding, impassive Pete Best seemed a veritable human Catherine wheel.

  Although the Kaiserkeller’s stage looked solid enough, it stood on a mess of half-rotten timbers supported only by a few flimsy orange crates. After the rival bands discovered this, the sole object of mach schau was to see who could first actually stomp his way through this worm-eaten edifice. To John’s chagrin, Rory Storm won the contest one Saturday night, leaping onto the piano during Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” with such force that it splintered the floor beneath and sank from view with Rory still on top like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

  Before these nights of shared endeavor in Hamburg, the Beatles and Ringo Starr had had little to do with one another. Back home, Ringo had always seemed a rather remote figure, as far above them in local celebrity as he was below all of them, except perhaps George, in class. Although only four months John’s senior, he seemed much older, with his Ford Zephyr car and fondness for personal jewelry, especially rings, which he wore four or five on each hand. In those days, it was rare to see a man’s fingers, especially a workingman’s, so encumbered, hence the initial nickname Rings, which had evolved to Ringo with a little help from John Wayne’s Ringo Kid.

  His appearance was not prepossessing, the large nose and drooping Bassett hound eyes overdramatized by a Teddy Boy forelock and a scrubby beard. George Harrison had always thought “he looked like a tough guy…with that grey streak in his hair and half a grey eyebrow and that big nose,” and even John later incredulously recalled having been a little scared of him.

  Working together at the Kaiserkeller and looning around the Reeperbahn together after hours dispelled all such preconceptions. Ringo might come from the Dingle, Liverpool’s poorest area, and have had next to no formal education, the result of chronic bad health throughout childhood, but he possessed a natural articulateness, perceptiveness, and—one can call it only—sweetness that endeared him instantly to each of the very different Beatles. His droll, deadpan way with words was often the equal of John’s, though the two were never competitive, verbally or otherwise. Here, indeed, was one of the very few people around him destined never to feel the lash of the Lennon tongue.

  Even at this early stage, Pete Best had begun to show fatal signs of keeping to himself, with the result that Ringo increa
singly made up a fourth with John, Paul, and George. On October 15, they cut a demo record together, acting as sidemen to one of Ringo’s fellow Hurricanes, Lu Walters, whose deep, bluesy voice was chafing for solo exposure. At a tiny studio named Akustik, behind Hamburg’s central railway station, John, Paul, George, and Ringo backed Walters through a set of mainstream ballads, including George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess.

  As George said, and John did not demur: “When there were the four of us with Ringo, it always felt rockin’.”

  One late October evening, a customer walked into the Kaiserkeller who, unusually, was a resident of Hamburg rather than a sailor, a sex tourist, or a drunk spoiling for a fight. He was twenty-one years old and devastatingly good-looking, with large, liquid eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and long hair combed down around his ears and over his forehead as only a few young men on mainland Europe, and none in the English-speaking world, yet dared to do. His name was Klaus Voormann.

  Klaus was a graphic designer, just starting out in the world of newspapers, glossy magazines, and advertisement agencies for which Hamburg was secondarily famous. His clothes identified him as a beatnik and, therefore, respectably middle class, though here the movement’s look and spirit were markedly different from in Britain, America, or France. Hamburg’s beatniks called themselves exis—short for existentialists—and were stylistic radicals; boys and girls wore the same hairstyle (unusually long for one, unusually short for the other) and favored a minimalist, black leathery look that still had uncomfortable resonances of Hitler’s SS.

  Exis as a rule congregated in their own candlelit coffeehouses and bars and were most emphatically never seen amid the tawdry unsubtleties of St. Pauli. Klaus Voormann had found his way there almost by accident, while walking off an argument he’d had with his girlfriend earlier that evening. He stopped in at the Kaiserkeller for ein bier; instead, he got the Beatles.

  “For me it was like hearing every great rock-’n’-roll tune there had ever been, sung by all the greatest singers,” Klaus recalls. “They were like chameleons. John would be Gene Vincent, then he’d be Chuck Berry. Paul would do Elvis, then he’d do Fats Domino, then he’d do Carl Perkins. And in between, the two of them would argue…‘I want to do “Be-Bop-A-Lula” ’…‘No, I want to do it!’”

  Whatever John’s insecurities about himself, they were hidden from the transfixed German boy at his feet. “He loved singing, he loved the songs, and he loved playing rhythm guitar—he was a great rhythm guitarist. But what I felt most of all was the mind of this guy. All he wanted was to be outside the ordinary. To do something different. To do something outrageous.”

  Forgetting their earlier squabble, Klaus hurried off to his girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, and told her excitedly what he’d found. If he was beautiful, Astrid was a stunner, elfin yet voluptuous, the somber exi rig perfectly setting off her creamy skin, huge, black-rimmed eyes, and boyish crop of pale gold hair. At twenty-two, she was clearly destined for great things in Hamburg’s media world, having landed a job as assistant to the noted photographer Reinhart Wolf.

  Astrid was rather shocked to hear that Klaus had been slumming in St. Pauli and, at first, not at all keen to accompany him back to the Kaiserkeller as he wished. In the end, their whole exi circle went together, hoping for safety in numbers. On the stage, the Beatles became aware that a sizable portion of the audience now consisted of black leather.

  For all their ferocious cool, the exis were—if the word had only been around then—an uptight lot. Guilt over a war for which they bore no blame caused them to tiptoe through life as timidly as their black-leathern predecessors had arrogantly goose-stepped through it. “These Liverpool people were to us like magic,” Klaus Voormann says. “We could only look on them as fantastic creatures because they were open, they were friendly, they were quick, very very quick humor. And we loved it. And we knew how stiff we were, how hard we found it to let go. They had no problem, they talked about anything, they took the mickey out of themselves all the time. And we had to learn that. To laugh about our own hang-ups.”

  Since Klaus spoke the best English, he was deputed to make formal contact with the magical ones during their brief breaks between performances. He was himself a would-be guitarist and, it so happened, had recently been commissioned to design a record album cover, the Ventures’ Walk, Don’t Run. Hoping this might make a more eloquent self-introduction, he brought it to the Kaiserkeller and showed it to John, the one among the five he most wanted to meet. “I didn’t get that good a reaction,” he remembers. “John took only a brief look, then muttered ‘You should give it to Stu. He’s the arty one around here.’

  “John liked to intimidate people. As long as I knew him, he always would intimidate me. He was trying all the time to be the hard rock-’n’-roller. That’s why I was particularly proud that I found the courage to go over to him and speak to him. But even though he seemed so tough, I had the feeling that he was looking up to Stuart.”

  Astrid was mesmerized as Klaus had been, both by the music and the force of John’s personality. “I couldn’t believe there was a young boy who could put all his heart and soul into what he was singing. That was pretty amazing. He became the music and the lyrics. He had this strong attitude; I got the feeling it will be hard to get through to him or to get a nice answer.”

  But it was not John who drew her back to the Kaiserkeller time and again “like a drug.” It was the English boy as diminutive as herself who stood across the stage from John, wearing dark glasses and half turned away with his heavy bass guitar as if embarrassed by his own playing. To Stu Sutcliffe’s astonishment, he began to be showered with compliments in forthright German style from the Beatles’ new exi following, especially the regular threesome of Astrid, Klaus, and another aspiring photographer, Jurgen Vollmer. “Just recently,” Stu wrote to his mother, “I have found the most wonderful friends, the most beautiful looking trio I have ever seen…the girl thought that I was the most handsome of the lot…. Here was I, feeling the most insipid working member of the group, being told how much superior I looked—this alongside the great Romeo John Lennon….”

  Astrid had fallen for Stu in the first moment she set eyes on him. But to begin with, she hid her feelings behind a photographer’s professional interest in the group. Flattered by the admiration of so gorgeous a girl, the five Beatles needed no persuasion to do some pictures with her during their few daytime leisure hours. “I picked them up in my car,” she remembers. “They were all so sweet, they’d washed their hair and put on their best clothes.”

  As a location, she took them into Der Dom, the amusement park where Bruno Koschmider first had the idea of bringing live rock ’n’ roll to St. Pauli. It was a chill, drizzly autumn day, with few people about, so Astrid was free to pose her slightly mystified subjects clustered at leisure around old-fashioned calliopes or perched on silent traction engines. Speaking so little English, she had to communicate her instructions mainly by gesture, sometimes physically twisting them around, moving their limbs or turning their heads in the required direction. She had expected John to be the most difficult and disruptive of the five. “In private he was always joking, doing faces and things, and was never serious. But when I took the pictures, he was so dead professional it was unbelievable.”

  The prints that Astrid subsequently produced could not have been more of a surprise. To begin with, they were not the glossy living color in which German Agfa then led the photographic world, but grainy matte black and white, more suggestive of the late-nineteenth century than the mid-twentieth. The subjects, too, had an almost Victorian air, posed on and around the heavy old industrial artifacts, their efforts to look cool and hard and don’t-give-a-damn only emphasizing their almost ridiculous youth and innocence and vulnerability. So was created not only a revelatory self-image for this pop group but the template of all pop groups forevermore.

  Paul McCartney, Pete Best, even the gawky George Harrison, had always possessed a degree of con
fidence in their own looks. But John thought himself ugly, hence that preemptive impulse to make himself grotesquely so whenever a camera was pointed at him. Astrid’s lens caught his face, for the first time since long-ago childhood, without any of its self-conscious and defensive idiot stares or leers: one could see the fine cheekbones, inherited from his mother; the delicacy of the mouth in repose; the shadows of sadness that still haunted the close-set eyes. “He was as beautiful as any of them,” Astrid says. “He just never saw it before. He loved his pictures. I realised what a tremendous respect he had for perfectionism. That was the first time I felt that he respected me.”

  During the Der Dom shoot, Astrid’s feelings for Stu, and his for her, came into the open, and from then on, their relationship made rapid strides. In the absence of paint, Stu communicated his rapture and astonishment in words that glowed almost as much; Astrid, he wrote to a Liverpool friend, was “like a rose that has run its dark leaves over the wall to look at the sun…[her] eyes full of fire, and now full of dew….”

  Together with her beauty and stylishness, Astrid possessed all the solid instincts of the hausfrau. Rather than try to compete with John and the other Beatles for Stu’s attention, she took all five under her wing, inviting them to her comfortable home in the suburb of Altona, letting them have much-needed baths there, cooking them huge meals of steak or eggs with English-style chips, even washing their clothes. Never again would any girlfriend—let alone one from an alien culture—be welcomed into their inner circle in the same unreserved way. John’s letters home to Cynthia were so full of admiring references to Astrid that Cyn began to feel pangs of jealousy.