The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  This time, they needed serious help.

  Of all the characters influential in the Liverpool beat scene, the Silver Beetles turned to only one—again: Allan Williams. But Williams was up to his whiskers in other problems. In mid-June, when the steel band failed to show for their regular Tuesday night performance at the Jacaranda, Allan was informed they’d done “a moonlight flit.” Unbeknownst to him, the “dusky troupe,” sans Lord Woodbine, crept into the basement after hours and made off with their set of tinny oil drums. Williams depended on music to attract college students to the Jacaranda, and the intensely exotic steel band gave him untold cachet. Williams’s nightmare was that they’d gone over to the Royal Restaurant, whose owner, Ted Roberts, had tried repeatedly to woo them away and, when that failed, declared “war” on the Jacaranda. But, alas, it was worse than that. They were nowhere in Liverpool. Or even Great Britain, for that matter. Where in the world, he wondered, would a Caribbean steel band find favor and gainful employment?

  Given any number of guesses, it is unlikely he ever would have come up with Hamburg, Germany.

  Two summers before, Williams and his wife, Beryl, had befriended a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker they’d picked up on the road from Chester to Liverpool. The boy, whose name was Rudiger, was from Ahrensburg, a few miles north of Hamburg, and he beguiled them with tales of hedonistic excess surrounding the bustling German port. Rudiger—whose name they anglicized as Roger—returned to Liverpool several times the following year, always extending an invitation for Allan to “come to Germany and stay with him.” Now, prompted by rumors of his steel band’s new home, the opportunity presented itself.

  Williams, along with the irrepressible Lord Woodbine, booked a weekend charter to Amsterdam and then connected by train to Hamburg, where he arranged to stay chez Rudiger, who was delighted to be able to reciprocate. Looking rather Mephistophelian, they set off, conspicuous in their matching top hats, with shabby suits, scruffy beards, and wild-looking hair, and chainsmoking cheap English cigarettes.

  To many people, Hamburg was a terrifying place: bustling, turbulent, dirty, decadent, German—especially for Liverpudlians, whose city had been strafed by Messerschmitt bombs. But Williams basked in its seedy glow. “Hamburg fascinated me,” Williams wrote in an unpublished memoir. For someone who traded in hyperbole, that was an understatement of colossal proportions. No city could have been more aptly suited for a man on the make such as Allan. All day long, he and Woody trolled the notorious St. Pauli district, pickling themselves in the endless chain of bars and wandering through the mazy arcades that featured flagrant down-and-dirty sex shows and where prostitution was hawked in roughly the same manner as schnitzel.

  There was something else, too. With all the British and American servicemen stationed in Hamburg, demand for live music far exceeded the supply. Despite all future denials, Williams knew that—and he’d brought a tape along with him, showcasing three Liverpool bands, including the Silver Beatles (they had changed the spelling in June), which he intended to play for German club owners. If he timed things right, Williams could corner the Hamburg market for British bands.

  Sometime on a weekend in early July—the exact date cannot be determined, but it was a night when Lord Woodbine, exhausted, remained behind in a strip club on the Grosse Freiheit—Allan Williams wandered through the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red-light district, taking its fidgety pulse. Stopping outside the Kaiserkeller, a three-step-down tourist club, he listened to a “dreadfully crummy” German band attempt to mug its way phonetically through a set of American rock ’n roll standards. Their delivery was awful. Seizing the opportunity, Allan pushed through the club’s big glass doors and accosted the Kaiserkeller’s manager, a florid-faced man with a preposterous wiglike mop of hair named Bruno Koschmider, and made his pitch. As “the manager of a very famous rock ’n roll group in England,” Williams proposed to stock the Kaiserkeller with authentic British bands for the sum of £100 per week, plus expenses. It was a ridiculously large amount of money and Williams knew it, but he held his ground when Koschmider expressed interest.

  With a cardsharp’s sangfroid, Williams handed over the preview tape he’d made. But when the tape rolled, it contained nothing but babble; someone or something had distorted the magnetic signal rendering the performance useless.

  The flush on Williams’s face grew so intense that it seemed to sizzle. Skeptical, Koschmider backed away from his previous offer. He flatly refused to book a band without hearing them. Apologizing, Williams promised to send a proper tape as soon as he returned to Liverpool, but he left the Kaiserkeller sensing that he’d blown the opportunity of a lifetime.

  He was wrong: that distinction would come later. Meanwhile, upon returning to Liverpool, there were more vital concerns that served to distract Allan Williams from his temporary setback.

  The Seniors were waiting for him as he stumbled home from the “dirty weekend.” Steady gigs were hard to come by in Liverpool, where standard practice was a sampling of itinerant one-nighters, so they insisted that Williams make good on his promise to introduce them around the London club scene. There was work in London—or “the Smoke,” as it was called in the provinces—where residencies were common and house bands drew interest from talent scouts. The Seniors were sure that, given the chance, they could make a similar impression.

  Howie Casey remembers his skepticism at Allan Williams’s ability to come through for them. “He was always thinking on his feet, talking fast, with no real credentials, aside from his tongue.” But a week later, on July 24, Williams pulled up with two cars, packed in the entire six-piece band along with all their equipment, and took off for the Smoke. “Incredibly, he drove straight to London, stopping magically on Old Compton Street, right in front of the Two I’s,” Casey says. The Seniors stared openmouthed at the holy shrine, “the place all the important bands in London played,” which until then had existed only as a fantasy in their minds. It was the middle of the afternoon and the place was packed. Upstairs, in the café, there were rocker types hunched over a jukebox, studying the selections. A Screaming Lord Sutch record was blasting over the speakers. “We were in totally alien country,” Casey recalls thinking. “Liverpool boys in a London coffee bar—to everyone there we were thick and stupid.”

  Williams seemed to know Tom Littlewood, who ran the place. Shifting the ever-present toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, Littlewood herded them downstairs, where groups showcased their stuff. “We’ll put you on after the next band,” he promised.

  The next band, as it was, proved a hokey Shadows knockoff, and the Seniors impressed with their energetic R&B set. “I thought we acquitted ourselves quite well,” Casey recalls, “although we were distracted by Allan, who was standing in the audience.” From the stage, they could see a slightly contorted, older-looking man trying to make contact with him, actually elbowing the crowd aside as though it were a matter of life and death. In his memoir, Williams claims disingenuously that he couldn’t immediately identify the eccentric figure who practically leaped into his arms, but he would have had to have been blind not to recognize Bruno Koschmider.

  In the standing of Beatle kismet, this episode ranks near the top. Koschmider, convinced by Williams’s pitch that British bands would add spark to his club, had flown north to scout bands for a residency at the Kaiserkeller. “What a coincidence!” the two men exclaimed, hugging each other like long-lost cousins, but the Seniors weren’t so sure. The reunion seemed almost too accidental.

  Initially, Williams and Koschmider had trouble communicating; after some awkward jabbering, a Swiss waiter from the Heaven and Hell, a neighboring coffee bar, was enlisted to translate. Koschmider explained that he was seeking a replacement for Tony Sheridan, who had recently decamped to the rival Studio X. Tony Sheridan: even then the name struck a resonant chord. A guitarist of extraordinary flair, he’d backed Marty Wilde and Vince Taylor before drawing a cult following of his own. His rave 1959 appearance on Oh Boy! was one of th
ose transcendent TV moments in which an unknown performer leaps from obscurity to stardom. But Sheridan, it turned out, was a remarkable head case. Late for nearly every appearance, he often arrived without his guitar, was duly pissed, forgot words to songs, offended promoters, and simply didn’t give a hoot. Eventually, television and the BBC refused to touch him. But in Hamburg, Sheridan became an overnight folk hero. “He was the star,” recalls a denizen of the local scene. In Hamburg it didn’t matter if he got loaded before a show or mooned the audience, it didn’t matter if “he went nuts onstage.” The Germans “loved that kind of outrageous behavior.” In Hamburg, where nothing was considered over the top, Tony Sheridan loved testing the limits. “He was unpredictable, very violent,” says an observer. “He wouldn’t stay on the stage [when he performed]. He’d tumble on[to] the dance floor, then roll around and put his body forward in an obscene gesture.” One of the musicians who worked with him recalls a recurring stunt that had made Sheridan an instant legend on the Reeperbahn: “Tony was extremely well endowed and he wasn’t adverse to displaying it to the audience. ‘Hey, you fucking Germans, check this out!’ There was always the threat of some madness.”

  That was a hard act to replace, but Bruno Koschmider had to fill the void somehow. At the Two I’s, he’d liked what he’d seen. Derry Wilkie, a real live wire, was black. He wasn’t Tony Sheridan, not by a long shot, but for the moment he was the next-best thing. Plus, the Seniors cooked. “[Koschmider] made us an offer on the spot,” Howie Casey recalls. “We didn’t even ask how much money we’d be paid. It didn’t matter. We had a gig—great! We were going to Germany for a month.” And off they went.

  The Kaiserkeller was all Allan had cracked it up to be—“as big as the Rialto,” thought Casey, when he and the Seniors walked in—with a decent-size stage and P.A. system, but was foreboding. Willy Limper, the club’s manager, scoffed when they asked about their accommodations. “You stay here!” he declared, pointing toward the floor. Downstairs, it turned out, were two windowless rooms, with one bed, a settee, and two armchairs—for six men! One blanket—an old Union Jack—was provided, to be shared. No sink, no shower or bath. They could wash up in the ladies toilet, which was used by hundreds of people each night and not cleaned until the following afternoon, so “you just became funkier and funkier as time wore on.”

  Work began at seven o’clock, and the pace was grueling: four 45-minute sets, with fifteen minutes off for the band to tank up on free beer. The forty-five-minute blocks meant learning more material, or just stretching each song into drawn-out jams. The band also filled time with long calypso numbers whose melodies were borrowed from Lord Woodbine but whose rude lyrics were improvised on the spot. “It was all to do with ‘wanking’ and ‘cocks,’ ” recalls Casey. “And, of course, we were killing ourselves laughing, thinking how amusing it was that the Germans were dancing away, digging it, without understanding a word.” Not that anyone minded. “The crowds were great. When we played, they leaped on the tables, going absolutely apeshit.” But they were also fickle. As soon as the set ended and the jukebox went on, the place emptied out, which meant that intermissions were eventually abolished.

  It didn’t matter. When the joint was rocking, there was no better place to play. But as time wore on, the once-naive Scousers began to notice another vibe in the Kaiserkeller—a core of intense, dark violence just under the glitzy surface. Willy Limper had presented himself as a dimpled, jolly old German geezer, but “a nice vicious streak” revealed the essential man. He ran Koschmider’s infamous empire—a network of seedy music and strip clubs—with an iron fist that struck swiftly and without mercy. As one musician remembers observing: “When somebody didn’t pay their bill, they were hauled into Willy’s office so we could watch what was going on. The waiters had koshes”—leather saps—“and would stand in a semicircle, whacking the guy from one waiter to the next, playing tennis with him.” Other times, violators were kicked senseless and then hauled into the back alley, where they were dumped, unconscious, alongside the garbage. Entertainment was merely a sideline for Koschmider. His tentacles extended to all kinds of vice—prostitution, child pornography, drugs, and protection. “Limper was the leader of his gang, and the waiters were his enforcers,” says an observer.

  It was a familiar showbiz story. As in Cuba and Las Vegas, entertainment provided a glamorous front for racketeers. But as Derry and the Seniors acclimated themselves to the Reeperbahn, they viewed their situation as being quite wonderful indeed. “We were in heaven,” Casey says. Audiences loved them. They drank their weight in free vodka and whiskey. They discovered big department stores in Mönckebergstrasse, whose restaurants served schwartzwalder kirschtorte—rich cakes filled with wonderful cream that were unlike anything they’d eaten in Liverpool. And they gorged on sex. According to one of the musicians, “you had to chase and work at British girls.” The minute they hit Hamburg, however, it seemed as if “girls came out of the woodwork.” There was a girl for everybody, and not just edge-of-the-bed virgins, like back home. These girls were polished, stylish, smart, and fashionable. The musicians were invited to the homes of their German girlfriends, introduced to approving mothers, and then hauled upstairs to bed. The Scousers were shocked, just shocked! Even more so when they all got gonorrhea. “We were going to marry those girls,” says one of the Seniors, “never realizing that Willy Limper was giving it to them, as were most of the waiters.”

  To each of the Seniors alike, it “was like being released into a sweet shop, a first-class orgy.” So it was not surprising that after a month of pure bliss, the Seniors panicked when a letter from Allan Williams arrived, threatening to torpedo their perfect world. According to Williams, Koschmider had another club on the Grosse Freiheit that begged for another Liverpool band. That, in itself, actually seemed promising; it would be good, they thought, to have some companionship in Hamburg. But the Seniors were convinced that the group in question “would ruin the scene.”

  Williams’s letter delivered the news: he was sending the Beatles.

  Chapter 12 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 Beeth
oven.” “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.”